LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 
^T^t^S" 

Chap. Copyright No.. 

SheliJy.A 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



Ube Sba&ow Cbrfst 



Hbe Sbabow Christ 



AN INTRODUCTION TO CHRIST HIMSELF 



(Beralfc Stanley Xee 

AUTHOR OF "ABOUT AN OLD NEW ENGLAND CHURCH" 




flew J£>orft 
ttbe Century Co, 

1896 



*7 



-#t* 



Copyright, 1896, 
By The Century Co. 



The DeVinne Press. 



Contents 



PAGE 



I The Pagan Emphasis .... i 

II The Emphasis of Life .... 8 

III The Emphasis of the Ideal . 12 

IV The Hagar Nation 19 

V Thou Shalt Not 22 

VI Thou Shalt Not 28 

VII Thou Shalt Not 32 

VIII Thus Saith the Lord .... 36 

IX Milk and Honey 45 

X I Am that I Am 53 

XI Thy Gentleness Has Made 

Me Great 63 

XII Deep Calleth Unto Deep . . 72 

XIII Who Giveth Songs in the Night 77 

XIV When the People Saw the 

Mountain Smoking They 

Stood Afar Off S3 



CONTENTS 

XV "Where Wast Thou When I 
Laid the Foundations of 
the Earth?" 89 

XVI Curse God and Die 97 

XVII Doth Not Wisdom Cry and 
Understanding Put Forth 
Her Voice? 106 

XVIII Vanity ! Vanity ! All Is Vanity i 14 

XIX The Shadow Christ 118 

XX The Shadow Christ 123 

XXI The Shadow Christ 128 

XXII The Shadow Christ 134 

XXIII The Shadow Christ 146 







A book is the shouting of a man's heart 
from the housetops. 

The public is a cruel confidant. Either 
it hurts him who dares by not hearing what 
is most precious to him, for the rumbling 
of the drays — which is oblivion; or it 
hurts him when the drivers of the drays 
shout back — which is fame — the world's 
rushing compliment of misunderstanding a 
man instead of forgetting him. 

Yet who would not dare? 

No man shall lose his soul in risking it 
with its Larger Self. 

Out into the listening darkness, where 
the shadow audience waits — baffling in its 
very welcome — this little book goes forth. 
By far-off lamps it seeks you y by windows 
never seen ; past a mist of faces that an- 
swer not — and as, one by one, for their 
little life with the earth-light and your soul, 
you open these leaves of mine, each brings its 
greeting from a world I love — its hope and 



fear of you — before you fold it back into 
the darkened place, where it shall wait and 
watch for the coming of men. 

A clumsy thing — a little pasteboard and 
gilding and type — a book — with the hum 
of the paper-mill lingering in it and the 
touch of unknowing hands. With the col- 
ors of desire and the symbols of experience — 
to give one's soul to paper — to have it 
flashed forth in bare black and white, and 
thrown, like the news of the night, in the 
dooryards of the world. Paper is but paper 
to the world, and a book — a book. 

But the Great Spirit — who to and fro 
between our solitudes goes guarding the 
children of thought — shall read with you 
these broken memories of days He has 
walked with me ; and Life — the gentle old 
interpreter — shall bring the meanings 
home, at last. 

In the brotherhood of play and worship 
and the humor and awe of truth shall we 
be wayfarers together. This is not an ar- 
gument, but the breath of a land that is 
loved, not gaining its way by a logical use 



of terms — nay, losing it, perhaps, in low 
music without words — a spirit — a passing 
light — like a halo on the hills — with no 
authority but its shining — perhaps — with 
no importance but its being loved, with no 
ambition except to be forgotten when Truth 
is more beautiful than now. Too reverent 
of the Unknown God and too proud of the 
spirit of man to settle anything — a book 
with but one hope which can come to pass — 
that in being read it may read you ; and 
with one truth that can always stand — that 
of being true to itself 



Zbc Sba&ow Cbtist 



"A man shall be as the shadow of a great 
rock in a weary land." 



Zhc Sbabow Christ 

i 

Ube pagan iBmpbasis 

Looking at the world with the cosmic 
vision that has come to us, there is a 
tendency to limit the moral genius of the 
Hebrew to a somewhat smaller place than 
it really occupies in the supreme civiliza- 
tion of the earth. The faint gleams of 
our own truth on the eastern horizon 
of thought have come to us, and it is not 
unnatural to mistake the afterglows of the 
waning visions of India for a beautiful 
gray pagan dawn that will soon suffuse 
the world and enlighten the Christ. When 
a strange religion floats to us across the 
seas, like the chant of countless peoples 
from the mysterious land of legend, with 



ttbe Sba&ow Gbrtet 



all the charm and theological romance that 
dream by the sunrise, the tendency on the 
part of the rarest men — the world-listeners 
— is to listen to other revelations overmuch, 
to come to conclusions that should only 
be reached by the study of the civilizations 
they have produced. 

The man with an international, inter- 
eon insight — who has the temperament of 
a Japanese mirror, who sees through to 
China when he looks at the reflection of 
American life, or Buddha when he studies 
the Beatitudes ; whose spiritual life, blend- 
ing Christ and Confucius, the Koran and 
the Sermon on the Mount, is a world- 
anthology, with touches of truth from the 
Veda and the Old Testament, from Rous- 
seau, Thomas a Kempis, Walt Whitman, 
Plato, Athanasius and Mrs. Besant — is 
prone to be grotesque with what would 
otherwise be a very beautiful conception. 
Being a whole world by himself, a sum- 
total sui generis, he does not quite know 
how to master it, and fails signally in the 
very sense of proportion which he has col- 



Zbe U>aaan Bmpbasfa 



lected himself from everywhere to illustrate 
— to a provincial Christendom. His bal- 
ance fails generally in the direction of his 
favorite ignorance. It would not be called 
ignorance. It would be called new know- 
ledge; but, from the Tree in the Garden 
until now, new knowledge has been but the 
showy side of what men did not know. 

It is well to listen to Omar Khayyam 
singing like an ^Eolian harp in the desert, 
with the winds that blow down from the 
stars, but the Astronomer Poet was not 
Persia. The Christian religion is not its 
deeds. The pagan religion is not its songs. 
Our souls are filled with the dreamy voice 
of Mozoomdar, and thoughts, like incense, 
swing to and fro out of the reverie-land 
of the East; but Mozoomdar is not India. 
As long as we judge pagan religions by 
their ideals and Christianity by its per- 
formances, the place we give to the legacy 
of the Hebrew race will be far beneath its 
importance. 

The emphasis of the half- unveiled — the 
beautiful endeavor of the spirit to atone, to 



Gbe SbaDow Cbrfet 



eke out its ignorance with kindness — ever 
overreaches itself. The fairer comparison 
of civilizations and revelations is not gained 
by looking down from the words of Christ 
to their fruits in the government of the 
western world, but by looking up from the 
fruits of the East to the fruits of the West, 
and from the words of Confucius to the 
words of Christ. Until that far-off day 
when words and deeds are synonyms this 
is the first principle of comparison. Each 
must be compared with its own kind. 

The only way for the western idealist to 
vitally appreciate the Hebrew who made 
him possible is to be transmigrated from 
the Browning Club into a sleepy little 
heathen Hindoo, toddling around a bun- 
galow, wondering what everything is about, 
until, brought up to dream in the India 
schools, through the religion and the life 
of his people he moves out at last to the 
thought of the world and discovers Chris- 
tianity. 

In comparing the Hebrew and other 
contributions to humanity, a man born in 






Zbe pagan jEmpbasfs 



a Christian country is at a singular philo- 
sophical disadvantage. He has to think 
his way backward to the pagan religions, — 
almost as confusing and untrue as render- 
ing "Parsifal" backward, note by note, or 
culminating the great drama of Bayreuth 
with the dark wonder of the Kundry motif, 
instead of the Saviour strains of the Grail, 
and the echoing Glaubenstema. Mozoom- 
dar follows the logical order of revela- 
tion. As his heart widens out he thinks 
his way — not backward, but forward, over 
dead nations and sleeping gods, to the 
climax of human faith. His spiritual ex- 
perience is arranged by sheer circumstance, 
according to the dramatic unities. In ex- 
pressing philosophically the Christian point 
of view he has but to think his life. Canon 
Farrar, in trying to realize the pagan point 
of view, would have to ^^think his life — 
if a word may be coined, the very awk- 
wardness of which reveals its meaning. 
Our knowledge constitutes our ignorance 
of the ethnic religions. The perspectives 
are disturbed and the shadows are in the 



Gbe Sba&ow Cbrist 



wrong places, but a pagan approaches 
Christianity the way the world did. Every 
man born into the natural heathenism of 
being a boy follows spiritually the logical 
order of revelation in his own life; but Chun- 
der Sen, when his soul peers over the ut- 
most of his native worship and gazes for 
the first time upon the vision of Judea, fol- 
lows the old heartache of the world, and 
onward — like a miniature human race 
moving through his soul — through the 
faiths of centuries and beautiful dead ideals 
he passes to his God. It is a cosmic expe- 
rience. The heartbeat of all the nations 
shall be in the love of such a man for One 
who, like Day and Night, shines and shad- 
ows over all lands and peoples until they 
know Him. 

His Christianity alone can have the world- 
depth, to whom has come the wandering 
through the world to reach it. He thinks 
centuries, and wonders religions that we can 
only guess. We can never conceive the 
climax of the Hebrew revelation. We have 
not experienced it as a climax. We can 



Zbz pa^an iBmpbasfa 



state it — we can write down symbols, 
guessed from our unthinking — but we can- 
not unwind the years that are gone, and we 
can hear but faintly in the far-off place of 
books the footsteps of our fathers coming 
to our faith. With the wistfulness of the 
Messiah has come to our Christianity the 
emphasis from above, and that which ap- 
peals to the converted Hindoo as a climax 
is to us an uncompleted prophecy still seek- 
ing for its higher self, in the day when our 
revelation shall be our civilization, and not 
the token of it, and belief shall be life. 
But with his actual biography of convic- 
tion the converted Hindoo enters into a 
religion which is a cosmic symphony, filled 
with the struggles and dreams of belief, 
retrospective, dark, and splendid with mem- 
ory, and glad with the Final Word — he 
comes with the ethnic emphasis — the em- 
phasis from below. 



II 
XTbe fimpbasis of Xife 

By taking the centuries one by one into 
its confidence a great book lives. One 
year at a time it earns its greatness. It is 
immortal, because it never lets a moment 
go. The world shall be filled with no 
passion or question or despair it will not 
share. It knocks at every door. It beats 
down every barrier. With the flush of its 
mighty youth it gathers its thousand years. 
It throws itself upon life, the substance of 
which immortality is made. 

A Bible lives because it strives — adapt- 
ing, resisting, impelling. It lives by being 
lived. Renewed with each new childhood 
of the earth, forever in the heyday of its 
strength — men call it old because it has 
been young so long. 



Gbe Bmpbasfs of %itc 



The assertion that he who knows the 
Scriptures will possess all knowledge, made 
with the deftly concealed autobiographical 
feeling of the man who is obliged to make 
it, is founded upon an underestimate of a 
book the very first principle of which is 
that it is so intimate with life that it can- 
not be interpreted by itself and requires all 
knowledge to show how true it is. It finds 
its authority in seeking out the answer of the 
human race. From the beginning to the 
end it seems to search — " Is not this true?" 
A divinely unfinished book, faith does not 
consist in repeating it. Faith is our life 
with it. It does not live for us. It does 
not see for us or see to stop our seeing. 
It was not inspired to stop inspiration. It 
will receive before it gives. 

The disciples did not follow the Master 
because they believed in Him. They be- 
lieved in Him because He made them be- 
lieve in their own lives. The faith of the 
Son of God was His faith in the sons of 
men. Crying His faith upon the very cross, 
it is His divinity that he brought out the 



io Gbe Sba&ow Gbrist 



divinity of those who crucified Him ; that 
he had the divine daring to give them di- 
vine work to do and divine things to see, 
and showed them that they could see and 
do them. It is His divinity that He strives 
with men, not through a book, but through 
a life that completes the book — through 
that greater soul, wrapped like a larger 
self around every man, which is the diviner 
half of the Bible; which, whether it be 
called the Christian Consciousness, or the 
world, or life, is at once the approach and 
the issue of the truth — the eternal, tire- 
less, patient emphasis of God. 

But while the pervading human life is 
the pathway the Father of the prophets 
has placed before His book, no one who 
has not a private door shall enter there. 
The youth who reads looks forward to his 
own soul, and to him who sees his life be- 
hind him, the story of Israel is the clumsy, 
halting, mimic Bible he has been himself 
Egypt is his metaphor. The wilderness 
his figure of speech. The Leviticus period 
that comes to all development, the Elijah 



Gbe JBmpbaste of life 11 



attitude, the David time of war and song, 
the period of Proverbs, of captivity — he 
has lived but these. The Isaiah spirit seek- 
ing him at last and opening the vision of 
faith, the Bible is God's account of him. 
Strange, and sad, and beautiful, and help- 
less, and perverse, he comes to his New 
Testament as the Hebrews came to theirs. 
He but reads the Bible with his own. 

The omnipresence of the Great Book is 
but the omnipresence of life. It makes 
every century the comrade of ours, and 
every man its parable. The contempo- 
raneous is history flattened out. All time 
covers every moment like the sea. The 
world is the huge mimicry of a single man. 
The great abstractions that govern nations 
are but the inventories of old histories. 
Theology is biography. Men are the 
creed of God. 

An empty Bible, in an empty universe, 
in an empty life, — to him who dares to 
read a Bible by itself. 



Ill 
Ubc lEmpbasis of tbe ffceal 

But between the Hebrew unfolding his 
thousand-year vision and the insight of 
our modern life has arisen, under the guise 
of freedom of thought, a slavery to the 
matter-of-fact, a scientific petulance which 
has strangely disturbed the real spiritual 
values of the Old Testament. 

Forgetting in the first importance of a 
fact (its being true) its second importance 
(its being kept where it belongs), the huge 
Moment in which we live is prone to be- 
wilder the truth with statistics — to forget 
the epic outlines, the sweep, the mighty 
movement of that vast conception, when, 
thousands of years ago, down the footpath 
of the Hebrew soul there came a God to 
struggle with the nations of the earth. 



Zbe J6mpbaste of tbe f Seal 13 



He may not have come. He may not 
have thought of coming. Though it be 
from the beginning to the end, the romance 
of a national imagination, the sacred ghost- 
story of the world, it has become the most 
literal, the most material reality in the his- 
tory of men. With every fact and every 
theory brought forth against it, stripped to 
the nakedness of a dream, the very dreaming 
of it is the most consummate achievement, 
the most dynamic event in human destiny. 

If the sea is a lie, to have thought of 
such a sea involves the greatness of the 
sea itself. If Isaiah was impracticable — if, 
as a matter of fact, Jehovah did not at- 
tempt to put so much in one man, — it is 
enough to know, so far as essential truth is 
concerned, that He could if He would. In 
the mean time, combining gifts that only the 
divine heats of a hero's heart or the move- 
ment of great events could have blended 
together, Isaiah stands as an abstract of 
what a great man will be like when he 
comes — a shadowing forth of the ideal 
toward which we strive. 



i4 Gbe Sbafcow Cbtiat 



The actual is not the truth. It is the 
part of the truth that has been attained. 
The ideal is the truth — the whole truth. 
The criticism that makes a prophet im- 
possible only makes the dream of such a 
prophet more wonderful — a prophecy in 
itself. Facts did not create an ideal. 
Facts cannot destroy it. Facts destroy 
but facts. If a man is apparently de- 
stroyed by being proved a dream, the 
dream will make a score of men to take 
his place. It will call to them, struggle 
with them, lift them to itself. 

Nothing is more real than the ideal. 
Mountains are made of vapor, and the soil 
of the ground is as the dust of clouds be- 
side it. Brick and mortar are built upon 
it. Bronze and steel and gold and silver 
— the hands of men and the fingers of 
machines — wait upon it. The sheer mate- 
rial forces swung into its mighty service — 
the levers with which it lifts this little earth, 
dictating events, dominating nations, guid- 
ing philosophies, placing a strip of sky 
over every life, whirling the globe to every 



Gbe Bmpbaate of tbe IFDeal 15 



morning with a hope — the world itself is the 
massive measure of the spirit, the shadow 
God casts across time and space in stone and 
iron and fleeting things, of the dreams of men. 
The peculiar coordination of powers 
gathered into an ideal, a hero, and called 
his personality, we may dissolve. We may 
dissolve him into the forces of his time. 
We may dissolve him into his ancestors. 
But he is there. As a logical ideal he 
passes into life. His spirit possesses the 
world. In analyzing the inspirations of 
the Pentateuch, in showing the several 
men that Moses may have been, Moses is 
not removed. We are but given the gene- 
alogy of his greatness. If he might have 
been, he was; and whether he is a prophet 
or the prophecy of a prophet, he is a per- 
sonal actuality in human life, and one with 
which to live. Proving that he is a group 
of men cannot destroy him, any more than 
the slip of a scholar's pen could have cre- 
ated him. If it cannot be said of a man 
named Moses that he incarnated all of 
such a spirit once, it can be said that the 



16 XLbe Sba&ow Cbrfst 



spirit has become his incarnation, — that 
the incarnation of the Spirit which Christ 
reserved as the supreme and mightiest 
form of His Messiahship, has come through 
the lives of men to this soul of Sinai, that it 
has made him one of the dominant person- 
alities in the building of a world. He can- 
not be ignored as a fact — one kind of fact 
— and he defies the necessity, the moral 
helplessness, of being dependent upon an- 
other. He is a father of facts, though he 
be a myth. The margin of the Bible does 
not hold the fate of its great beliefs in its 
calculations, and the soul of Moses does 
not rest upon the skill of experts. 

Shakspere would be none the less a per- 
sonality whether he ever existed or not. 
If three poets had written the plays we call 
by his name, they would still represent a 
colossal individuality — a three-poet-power 
spirit. Whether He who governs the dis- 
position of forces blended the three actu- 
ally into one manifold life Himself, or left 
it to the world and the action of events to 
do it — makes an interesting and important, 



Gbe iBmpbaste of tbe 1R>eal 17 



but not fundamental, fact with regard to 
the content of his genius. The genius is 
here. It is a truth. How he came to be 
here is a question of fact. 

The great spiritual unities, when once 
they have come forth and faced the earth, 
when they have been wrought into its 
experiences, when they have become the 
builders of its facts — have become material 
in the most material sense; it is only the 
passing phase, the morbid literalness of 
our scientific spirit, which could have made 
the nobler unities so dependent on the 
smaller ones as to imperil faith. 

In tracing the evolution of the Christ 
idea, there would be a superficial and plau- 
sible convenience in arranging chronology 
so that Job would come between David 
and Isaiah; but, according to the content 
of his message and the unities of the truth, 
Job furnishes the link between David and 
Isaiah, though he prepared his message, 
perhaps, in an aloof life, and may have 
been singing in one wilderness while Moses 
was ruling in another. 



iS Gbe SbaDow Cbrtst 



Indomitably relevant, a great man places 
himself, like a great truth, where the tyr- 
anny of circumstance, the commands of 
time and place, are beneath his feet. He 
partakes of the ways of God. In the dis- 
tinction between the truth, which is the 
spirit, and the fact, which is the incident 
of the spirit, lies the only defense of the 
great Scriptural ideals. Ideals can only 
be defended by ideals. The facts, though 
they have incalculable modifying value, 
did not create the truth. They can neither 
save nor destroy it. 



IV 

Ube fcagar Batfon 

UPON our unshamed Gentile lips there 
shall be no unhallowed criticism of the 
saddened prophet-people that walk alone 
before the nations of the earth, with the 
fire of the old expectancy still beautiful in 
their eyes. 

Guilty, for hundreds of years, of a per- 
secution which is the vastest cowardice of 
history ; as disgraced men, who have re- 
venged with eighteen vindictive centuries 
the pitiful blunder of a day, — only in the 
utmost humbleness, with the tenderness of 
the One we cherish, shall the Gentiles say, 
" Thou didst crucify Him," or dare accuse 
the mightier nation for that one vast, swift 
moment, which shall be forever its awful 
title to more love and more forgiveness 

19 



XLbc Sba&ow Gbrtst 



than all the nations of the earth — because 
they took the cross that we would have 
had ready, and did our crucifying for us. 
The silence of Christ shall descend upon 
our brother's head to-day from those who, 
in the century when He came, would have 
led Him as a lamb to the slaughter in one 
year instead of three — who were not beau- 
tiful enough among the nations to have His 
mother born amongst us, or great enough 
to gather the traditions or sing the dreams 
that should feed the childhood of a god. 

A nation, the inspiration of whose very 
sins has furnished the imperative religion, 
and compelled the mightiest literature of 
the world, — a nation which has given the 
most sublime and consummate expression 
of repentance in all the unfolding of the 
human heart, — never to be forgiven itself, 
— at whose feet the peoples of the earth 
have learned to sing and learned to pray, — 
without whom never would the knowledge 
have come to us to condemn them, or the 
spirit with which to judge them, or the 
Christ with which to be superior to them, 



Gbe Ibagar IRation 



— that the Pharisee might be rehearsed 
again. 

Suffering under the supreme misfortune 
of being chosen of God, of being the most 
divinely exposed race, working out in its 
glowing public soul the salvation of us all, 
dedicating its very sins to humanity (sins 
sublimely remembered only because they 
were immortally confessed) — the Jewish 
nation has been condemned by those 
whose sins are not even remembered — 
ignobly forgotten; and in a world which 
the Jew has made possible, we look about 
us but to find that he is held responsible 
for his crimes, as if they were peculiar to 
himself, while his genius for God has been 
appropriated as the universal discovery of 
men, by peoples who would not have 
known that the crimes were crimes, had 
not the Jews in psalms and prophecies 
taught the stammering nations what sin 
was, until, sinning one more sin, in the 
shadow of the Cross, they fled from before 
the faces of men, with a confession which 
is the gospel of the earth. 



V 

TCbou Sbalt Wot 

All of the Ten Commandments but one 
tell people, not what they must do, but 
what they must not do. " Remember the 
Sabbath day to keep it holy " does not be- 
gin with a "Thou shalt not"; but it ends 
with one, and the only positive command 
that the Jews possessed in their great sa- 
cred classic was the fifth : " Honor thy 
father and thy mother." This is the one 
which they have notably kept, — the one 
without a " Thou shalt not " in it. 

The Ten Commandments are the epitome 
of Jewish history. With the negatives left 
out, they are all prophecies. "Thou shalt 
steal," "Thou shalt commit adultery," 
"Thou shalt kill." In telling the Jews 
what not to be, Moses gave the most mas- 

22 



CEbou Sbalt Hot 23 



terful synopsis of what they were — of what 
we would have been — that the world has 
ever seen. One of the great series of tri- 
umphant, godlike paradoxes which ended 
at last in a cross — it shall be remembered 
as part of the triumphant knowledge and 
the most strenuous hope of men, that the 
redeeming nation of the earth, laboring 
under its nine "Thou shalt nots," was a 
nation whose hymn-book was written by 
an adulterer, whose system of ethics was 
founded by a murderer, improved and 
given its most perfect expression by one 
of whom the world cannot forget that he 
had great riches, in his sayings about 
poverty ; or that he had one mistress to 
every four proverbs, in his sayings about 
life. A nation so covetous for its own 
brothers that we have sat at their feet and 
borrowed from their brains — to be cov- 
etous against our brothers. A nation so 
idolatrous that the conduct of its worship 
could but be assigned to the descendants 
of the priests of the Golden Calf; and yet a 
nation of whom it must always be said that 



24 Gbe SbaDow Gbrist 



there has never been a time in history 
when a Jew would not rather have given 
up all that he had and all that he was 
rather than give up being the son of Abra- 
ham and Isaac and Jacob, and beginning 
his prayers with the beautiful title for God 
that was woven of his fathers' names. 

He has kept the commandment without 
a "Thou shalt not" in it. He has always 
kept it. There is nothing he will not do 
to keep it — except keeping the other com- 
mandments ; an exception that he shares 
with a world which has learned almost 
everything from the poor Jew's sins except 
not sinning them — a world which did not 
even have the "Thou shalt nots " to sin 
against. 

Ever since the Bible commenced with 
pointing out the fruit that could not be 
eaten, prohibition has been the one invita- 
tion that the human heart was sure to ac- 
cept, and the profound failure of the Ten 
Commandments in the Jewish nation was 
the nine negatives. The first form of the 
Hebrew conception of duty — that is, the 



Gbou Sbalt Vlot 25 



typical human conception of duty — was 
No. There are promises, but the promises 
are given to those who will not turn to 
idols, and those who will not marry the 
Philistines. The Beatitudes of the Old 
Testament are " Blessed are the ones who 
will not" 

There has never been a people in the 
wide world who started their national life 
with so definite an idea of what they were 
not to do. The Old Testament is as largely 
a book of prohibitions as the New Tes- 
tament is of invitations. The prophet 
preaches " If you do not," and the prevail- 
ing tone of the gospel is " If you do "; and 
with prophets anointed to go from place to 
place making inspired objections, Jehovah 
was known by what he would not allow, 
his servants by what they avoided, and 
even the positive blessings are the rewards 
of negations; the evolution of a series of 
righteous acts thus inevitably becoming in 
Jewish history the evolution of a series of 
last resorts. Duty is the Alternative. 

And yet the negative tone of the Ten 



26 Zbe SbaDow Cbrtet 



Commandments was supremely logical. The 
field of vision was the wrong. There were 
nine things the children of Israel were do- 
ing that they ought not to do. There was 
one that they had better continue to do. 
The Commandments addressed themselves 
to the point. 

A negative is but the rudimentary form 
of a positive, and there is a latent affirma- 
tive throughout all the Mosaic tendency. 
But the Ten Commandments were not neg- 
ative merely because of the low plane of 
spiritual life among the people. Moses had 
commenced his career by saying that he 
could not be a prophet, and the negative 
was the instinctive and necessary approach 
of his spirit to the truth. Fifteen hundred 
years of Hebrew history are stamped with 
the individuality of one in whom the love 
of God was wrought out as an imperious 
obligation to do other than he would. 
The austerity of the Decalogue was Moses 1 
sternness toward the tenderness in himself. 
For not out of a mighty aloofness from sin, 
but out of a mightier intimacy with its aw- 



Gbou Sbalt mot 27 



ful will, had this leader of Israel struggled 
to the top of Sinai and under the eaves 
of the heavens written the desires of his 
heart. Lying at the feet of the Most High, 
striking with a burning pen across every 
desire the terrible, beautiful "Thou Shalt 
Not," he was prophet of the struggle, 
prophet of the struggle with himself, writ- 
ing commandments out of his conquered 
sins, — weary commandments, — too spent 
with victory to sing, too dread of defeat to 
sing — the infinite No, and silence. And 
thus as the first and necessary stage of the 
divine affirmative, No shall stand — the 
eternal symbol of the sublime, unwilling 
inspiration of the human heart. 

Only the No had been lived, and only 
the No could be prophesied. 



VI 

Ubou Sbalt Wot 

ii 

The men that Christ addressed needed 
prohibitions quite as much as the freed 
slaves at the foot of Sinai. It was the 
achievement of the spiritual experience 
called the Old Testament that the Beati- 
tudes did not read as Moses would have 
made them : " Unblessed are they that 
mourn not, for they shall not be comforted." 
" Unblessed are they which hunger and 
thirst not after righteousness, for they shall 
not be filled." " Cursed are the unmerci- 
ful, for they shall obtain no mercy." When 
Peter was taking his denials back, and the 
nails were being driven through his hands, 
there were no mighty " Thou shalt nots " 
echoing over the pain he had longed for; 
nor was there a voice calling to his cross, 

28 



Gbou Sbalt mot 29 



" Unblessed are ye when men shall not re- 
vile you and persecute you for my sake." 

" Simon, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest 
thou me?" 

In the darkness and the swoon : 

"Thou knowest that I love thee." 
The boast of a dead face. 

But Peter would not have died for the 
Decalogue — for nine things he could not 
do and one that he must. Jesus did not 
say, " If you do not come unto me, all ye 
that labor and are heavy laden, I will not 
give you rest." The soul had lived beyond 
the No, and thus while the Man of Galilee 
was wont to tell a man to love his wife, 
Moses had been wont to put the case, 
"Thou shalt not commit adultery." And 
in Exodus, "Love thy neighbor as thyself" 
is "Thou shalt not kill," a statement not 
only failing to be the best means of teach- 
ing the son of Abraham to love his neigh- 
bor as himself, but not even the best means 
of keeping his neighbor alive. 

Without doubt it was one of Bathsheba's 
charms that she was Uriah's wife ; but 



3° <Xbe SbaDow Gbrtst 



David killed Uriah because Bathsheba was 
beautiful and the Decalogue was not. If, 
like the soul of Christ, the sixth command- 
ment could have seemed to love David 
back, if it could have been positive, if it had 
been something that could have set his 
pulses beating and drawn him to itself, it 
would have saved the murder of Uriah ; 
but the sixth commandment was a Not- 
something. David had to break it to learn 
what it was. Like death, it had a hollow 
voice, and to sin or to die is to pass into 
the land where it speaks, and learn the 
concealed affirmative. 

The sturdy saints of the Old Testament 
learned the Commandments by breaking 
them. Through positive experience God 
wrought his Great Negations into history, 
and made the way across crime and peni- 
tential psalms to The Great Assertions. 

The Old Testament would be the most 
discouraging book in the world to read 
without knowing that a new one followed 
it. The Bible is the evolution of an em- 
phasis; its beauty through all the Mosaic 



Gbou ©bait fliot 31 



influence being the strenuous and terrible 
beauty, the sublime consciousness, of the 
Infinite No, until at last it breaks forth in 
the most beautiful words that were ever 
sung — the Infinite Yes — the prophecy 
of Jesus the Christ. Peter and Paul and 
John saw afterward. They reaffirmed the 
affirmed. But Isaiah, singing out of his 
broken life and his broken nation to the 
people of the Thou Shalt Not, is the most 
heroic spirit in the annals of men, because 
he sounded the victorious affirmative that 
has become forever the courage and the 
destiny of human life. 



VII 

Ubou Sbait Hot 
in 

It is a fundamental criticism upon the 
Ten Commandments that they could not 
be chanted ; that the Israelites sang about 
Jehovah and what he had done, but they 
did not sing about what he had told them 
to do — and that is why they never did it. 
It is the eternal symbol of ethics, — the 
conception of duty that cannot sing must 
weep until it learns to sing. This is Jewish 
history. 

Nothing could be more characteristic of 
the Hebrew than the way he left Egypt. 
He did not know where he was going; he 
knew from what he must get away, and 
from the beginning he comes to his moral- 
ity somewhat as he came to the Red Sea, 
expecting not only a force to drive him 



XLbou Sbalt mot 33 



into righteousness, but a miracle to help 
him through with it. The Ten Command- 
ments could not be more exuberant than 
the inspired experience of the great Sinai 
leader, and could not but breathe forth in 
their very form the sublime unwillingness 
and the bare victory with which they were 
wrought out. 

The fact that Moses was not allowed to 
enter the Promised Land is one of the reve- 
lations of the Old Testament. He was not 
a Canaan prophet. He was an out-of- 
Egypt prophet ; and it will always be the 
indictment of Israel that they were willing 
to live so many years in the Promised 
Land upon the inspirations of one who was 
not allowed to enter it — a primary prophet, 
inspired with a timely ignorance and a 
timely truth, whose message it was to tell 
all men that they must not be what they 
were, but whose greater message will ever 
be that prophets must not be what Moses 
was. And while it is but the charity of the 
historic sense to place every great soul in 
the frame of his time, and love him for the 




34 XLbc Sbafcow Cbtiet 



long heroic generations that he must have 
lived beyond his brothers; and while no 
vaster soul shall ever be held accountable 
for the degraded ways in which little men 
have used his inspirations to stop the world; 
it is but a tribute to him who first took the 
shoes from off his feet and walked on holy 
ground before the presence of the Lord, 
to hold his great name strictly within that 
beautiful fitness in which God gave it to 
the world. To the children of the Christ 
shall Sinai rest forever under the shadow 
of Nebo, nor may we ever forget that, by 
the decree of God, the prophet of the wil- 
derness belongs to the Wilderness himself. 
Hero of the Eternal No — we can almost 
see him now, standing on the Moab hills, 
with the pathos of the shut-out years 
pressed down upon his mighty spirit, trying 
to look with shaded eyes through the great 
cloud doors of heaven upon the land that 
was the promise of the people that he loved. 
Brave First Listener — with the old Jeho- 
vah voices sounding dim and far, with the 
ache of those unconquered cities in his heart, 



XLbon Sbalt Iftot 35 



turning back to Nebo to lie down with 
God. The silence folds him — with no 
children near; the winds, the low-voiced 
winds, beautiful wanderers from the haunts 
of men, come gently where he is, and with 
unseen hands touch the softened command- 
ment face ; and the Sunset comes and looks, 
and the Night, and there is One to watch. 
So comes to pass the wonderful never- 
coming-back that men call death — the 
lonely death that, like his lonely life, God 
kept for a beautiful secret to himself. 



VIII 

Ubus Saftb tbe Xot& 

FIFTEEN hundred years more beautiful 
than Moses, John of the Jordan wilderness 
comes to us, the last refinement and the 
highest development of the Mosaic ten- 
dency. Standing in the great assertive 
moment of history with the most specific 
and immediate Positive that ever fell from 
the lips of man, there seems to have gath- 
ered in him the residuum of that inspired 
negative which from the beginning had 
dominated the Hebrew life. 

With all the dreaming and the living that 
had come between ; with the mighty modu- 
lations that had been wrought in the voice 
of Sinai by the great Invitation Singers, 
and those full-hearted ones whom God had 
anointed to expect, it would be an exag- 

36 



Gbus Saitb tbe %ovb 37 



geration to say that John, the herald of 
Jesus, was a kind of contemporary Moses, 
facing God in Galilee as the leader of Sinai 
had faced him in the burning bush. But 
it would not be an idle exaggeration, and 
has within its doubtful boundaries a certain 
capacity to work out a thought for us. Per- 
haps it is more the picturesqueness of John's 
position in history than John himself, but 
whether he is really more illustrative or not, 
he certainly is more availably illustrative of 
the Old-Testament " Thus saith the Lord " 
than the Old Testament itself. Standing in 
high relief against the divine life, he drama- 
tizes the commanding ethical conception 
of fifteen centuries. It is placed in him 
once and forever, bold and strong beside the 
conception of eternity. With all that exu- 
berant atmosphere of promise that a herald 
must always have, John surely had about 
him a haunting spirit from far back in 
the years, a glorified "Thou SHALT NOT/' 
which made him as negative as a herald 
could be, and be a herald. 

As a method either in ethics or religion, 



38 £be Sbafcow Gbitet 



the lineal descendant of No is MUST. The 
spirit which in the rudimentary stages of 
prophecy had caused the law to be stated 
in negations is the same spirit which in the 
rudimentary stages of the Christian truth 
causes the gospel to be stated in obligations. 
Obligation was John's way of stating it. 

The contrasts that have been contrived 
between the law on the one side and the 
gospel on the other have long since receded 
from our thought, and except as conveni- 
ences for the stronger statement of lower 
and developing phases of the great para- 
dox, they stand as added symbols of that 
trait of finiteness, that whimsical dogmatism, 
that must ever be detected, as the years go 
on, in the deciduous theology of men. 

That God is Love, and that Law is the 
way he loves us, and that God is Law, and 
that Love is the way he rules us, must be 
an assured principle in any Messianic pre- 
sentation of the truth. Until we can separ- 
ate God from God or make him superior 
to himself, there is but one God and he is 
the God of the Law, and Jesus is its mighty 



Gbus Saftb tbe SLorD 39 



Adjective. The question before all the fol- 
lowing saviors of the world is not one of 
law or one of gospel, but a question as to 
the most inspired statement of the gospel 
law. This is the question that John asked 
Jesus — " Art thou he that should come, or 
look we for another ? " 

It was before he had heard of Christ's 
evangelistic methods that John had called 
him " One the latchet of whose shoes I am 
not worthy to unloose." Looking almost 
out of his grave to watch himself being 
forgotten, the John in the prisoner's cell 
was too essentially a preacher not to ques- 
tion the Son of God because he was differ- 
ent from himself. When his disciples re- 
turned to him with "Do you not remember, 
John, those old sermons of yours, the city 
trooping out to meet you — strong men 
crying out with a sense of their disobedi- 
ence — the long lines of weeping penitents 
that you baptized in the river ? " — when, as 
the shadows grew long in the cell, they told 
him the words of Christ, " Come unto me 
all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I 



40 Gbe Sba&ow Gbrfst 



will give you rest," there came into the 
broken old prophet's heart the thought of 
that greatest sermon of his life and the 
mighty climax of it, "Who hath warned 
you to flee from the wrath to come ? His 
fan is in his hand. He will gather his wheat 
into his garner, but he will burn up the chaff 
with unquenchable fire." And the more he 
heard about Jesus, his inscrutable " Abide 
in me," his eating with publicans, his divine, 
disreputable love for every one, — the more 
he wondered how this disastrous tenderness 
could belong to one in whose face he had 
seen, one wonderful day, the shining of God. 

If Jesus had approached the woman at 
the well with the air of being better than 
she was, she would either have doubted it 
or hated him for it. It was because he of- 
fered her the most perfect fellowship at first, 
and afterward told her all that she ever did, 
that he was the Son of God. 

It is because John would have com- 
menced with the seven husbands and would 
have conditioned his fellowship, that on 
hearing the rumors of Jesus he sent word 



XLbus Saltb tbe TLotb 4* 



to him " Art thou he that should come, or 
look we for another? " It was the residuum 
of the negative. It was the law trying to 
state the gospel and the obligation stating 
the invitation — a way of reaching men 
which Christ himself was never eloquent 
enough to attempt — to whom it has ever 
belonged to reveal, from the very first, a fel- 
lowship divinely unconditioned except by 
blindness in men themselves — the distinc- 
tive prerogative of whose mighty heart has 
ever been the beautiful recklessness with 
which he opened it and kept it forever 
open. 

The law with an open heart is the gospel. 
The law with the heart open first, 

God may be as frank as he will. It is 
the littleness of love that has taught us con- 
ditions and economies. The conditions of 
fellowship make themselves. The irrever- 
ent seeing of too much love, like the seeing 
of too many stars, is guarded forever by 
blindness. A great heart keeps its secrets 
like the sky, by being open. 

Though a merely apparent refusal and 



42 Gbe SbaDow Cbrfat 



but Moses' way of stating his fear to look, 
the Lord's refusal to let Moses see his face 
is one of the root-principles of the Deca- 
logue. John was the spiritual descendant 
of a prophet who would have been ruined 
at Sinai if he had let the children of Israel 
become too familiar with him. It was ap- 
propriate that he should go out into the 
wilderness of Jordan to keep his influence. 
His doctrine depended upon the wilderness, 
and John was too thorough a theologian to 
be an immediate convert to one who both 
by temperament and destiny kept out of it, 
and mingled with men. 

The most characteristic sentence that 
Jesus ever uttered was " Follow me," and 
it is because the spirit of the Old Testament 
says " Go," and the spirit of the New says 
" Come," that we know that God has been 
upon the earth. 

The emphasis of the Old Testament is in 
the second person. Its whole attitude is 
"Thou," and the New Testament which 
came with Christ is a revealed We from 
beginning to end — the mutual book in 



Gbua Saitb tbe Xorfc 43 



which the Law lived with the disciples, the 
terrible " Thus saith the Lord " kneeling 
down before a few unknowing fishermen 
to wash their feet. The real distinction 
between Jesus and his disciples was his in- 
credible approachableness — that he could 
get nearer to men than men could. The 
Son of God because he would almost 
rather have been called the son of man, 
he abolished forever the Divinity of Dis- 
tance and made fellowship the supreme 
attribute of God. With heroic simplicity- 
he risked his mission on the earth, and 
founded his title to be the ruler of men 
upon letting them be familiar with him. 
This is the most sublime and daring ad- 
venture in the history of truth. The 
gospel consisted in knowing him. Re- 
demption consisted in living with him. 
Salvation, impossible as an act, became in- 
evitable as an acquaintance, and the whole 
New Testament wins our hearts because 
our hearts are woven into it. Peter's 
epistles being published with his denials 
and Paul's sermons with Christ's — it is a 



44 Gbe Sbafcow Cbtiat 



shared book, in which God and men tell 
how they have loved and judged each 
other. 

Entering into the You and I, beginning 
to see duty from above, instead of seeing 
it from below — surrounding it with God 
— this is knowing what duty is. The op- 
portunity that He and we have together. 

The difference between the " Thus saith 
the Lord " and the " Abide in me " no man 
has ever told. At once the sublimest and 
tenderest truth in all the wandering of the 
human heart — the answer of the wistful- 
ness of thousands of sad dead years — there 
is nothing beautiful enough to say about it 
— except silence and living— and living — 
and living. 



IX 

flMlft an& Ibones 

On some accounts the best time to have 
been a preacher was just before Christ. 
Zechariah and Malachi had a great advan- 
tage in preaching Jehovah to their congre- 
gations. No one could ask for better ma- 
terial for powerful sermons than the minor 
prophets had — which explains their being 
minor prophets. Their sermons were all 
worked out for them. Preaching was sheer 
history. The bare facts of the Hebrew 
national life were brutally on the side of 
the preacher. A Hebrew audience could 
almost have been converted with a map; 
and spiritual insight, dramatic genius, or 
subtlety of philosophy, or ingenuity of 
statement would hardly seem to have been 
necessary to make a profound impression 



46 Gbe SbaDow Cbrtet 



upon the Jew. His doctrines had dates 
and places ; his belief was what had hap- 
pened to him ; his convictions were events, 
and the events said just what the prophets 
wanted them to. 

Wickedness was never remunerative in 
the Old Testament. The catastrophes that 
came upon the wicked were all accurately 
timed and overwhelmingly convincing. It 
was a book to delight a preacher's heart 
— the Arabian Nights of goodness. It 
had the appeal of appeals to the mass of 
men. Zechariah and Malachi were fortu- 
nate in being preachers just at the end 
of an Ancient Book, in which everything 
came out right, and just before the begin- 
ning of a New one, in which everything 
came out divinely and sublimely wrong. 

Jehovah began with what his children 
could understand — with stories — with tel- 
ling them w T hat he would give them if they 
would obey him — a new playground called 
Canaan — milk and honey. 

A Bible not full of inventories of pro- 
perty written with a naive relish that 



/HMlfc an& Iboneg 47 



soothes the guilty human heart, would not 
be human enough to have come from God, 
or divine enough to have understood hu- 
manity ; the only difference between the 
Jews and the Gentiles in the love of gold 
being that the former gained more to love. 
David sings, " The Lord is my shepherd ; 
I shall not want/' and the fear of God is 
the fear of poverty, and faith is the spiri- 
tual interpretation of gold. The Book 
of Job, sublime in being an exception, is 
founded on the wonder of a righteous man 
that the Lord could take away his riches 
when he had not sinned. Entering the 
presence of the Lord with his teasing, in- 
fidel swagger, Satan strikes the keynote 
of the Old Testament, " Doth Job serve 
God for naught ?" — the first anticipation 
of Christ's criticism on the origin of the 
Jew being curiously made by Satan him- 
self, some fifteen hundred years before. 
The Book of Job begins with an imposing 
processional of camels, and the woe of it 
begins with the fact that the camels are 
carried away. It rises by sheer force of 



48 TZbe SbaDow Cbriat 



personality into the New-Testament song 
of suffering, of freedom, of noble defiance 
of reward and supreme consciousness of 
God ; but all this glowing vision of the soul 
moves on to the climax, at last, of 1400 
sheep and 6000 camels and 1000 yoke of 
oxen and 1000 she-asses, — the necessary 
moral to the Jewish mind. Sheep, reli- 
gion, and camels. Righteousness, milk, and 
honey. And what the Jews would have 
done with the Book of Job if it had had a 
New-Testament ending they told the world 
with a cross. 

Solomon will be wise, but wise enough to 
be rich. The story of the Queen of Sheba 
gazing on his glories until " she had no 
more spirit in her " is handed down from 
generation to generation of mothers, to 
teach children morality and the pomp of 
righteousness ; and John himself, writing 
after Christ and trying to find a figure that 
would appeal to his people, brings a gold- 
loving Bible to a close with a shining He- 
brew picture of a sapphire heaven, with 
pavements of the root of evil and pearl 
gates and jasper walls. 



dfctlk an& 1bone£ 49 



" Blessed are ye when men shall perse- 
cute you " was not the text that led the 
children of Israel out of Egypt. In the 
childhood of religion, their Bible is the 
child bible of the human heart. " He that 
is greatest among you let him be your ser- 
vant " would not have been the watchword 
with which Abraham acquired his fortune ; 
and when Joshua led the people over Jor- 
dan, if they could have seen the crosses 
with which the King of the Jews rewarded 
his disciples, they would have turned back 
to Egypt. 

Christ's stories to his children ended in 
crosses ; Moses' in flocks. That a Bible 
that had failed to get men to perform their 
duties by placing riches at the end of them 
should go bravely and divinely on to try 
to get them to perform their duties with 
crosses at the end of them might seem 
strange; but crosses were more practical, 
— and Jesus was the Son of God because 
he knew it. 

Abraham is converted by an offer of 
sheep and a nation of grandchildren, and 
his Peradventure prayer is one of the great 



50 Zbe SbaDow Cbrfst 



bargaining classics of the world. When 
Jacob wrestles with the Angel of the Lord, 
and, getting what he wants, makes it the 
turning-point of his life and falls forth- 
with on Esau's neck, and is a good and 
prosperous saint ever afterwards, it would 
seem to make the best possible material 
for teaching ethics. When Joseph, who is 
the religious lad of the family, is put into 
a well, only to make the bad brothers bow 
the knee to him in Egypt ; when he resists 
temptation in Potiphar's house and is forth- 
with offered the Prime Ministry - — nothing 
could be better, one would think, for im- 
pressing the generations with a proper con- 
ception of duty than this. 

Pharaoh tries to be boldly wicked, and 
the twelve plagues announce to all men 
that it does not pay ; and when he breaks 
his word and pursues Israel, his army 
dwindles down to a few bubbles rising 
from the bottom of the sea. 

Amos and Haggai had all these facts on 
their side, but they accomplished nothing 
with them. The Savior of Success failed. The 



/DMlfc anfc Iboneg 51 



delicious boyish thrill of Hainan's leading 
the beggar Mordecai in the king's clothes 
around the city, the exultant justice of Ha- 
inan's hanging on the gallows he had pre- 
pared for Mordecai, would make a climax 
in a sermon to men ; but it failed. In the 
New Testament Mordecai would have been 
hung, and Jesus, committing the very im- 
portant mistake of bearing his own cross, 
conquers the nations of the earth. 

Esther weeping for joy because God re- 
wards her with saving her people, in the 
New Testament is Mary weeping in the 
darkness under the cry of her child, " My 
God, my God, why hast thou forsaken 
me?" 

Daniel, made Lord High Chancellor for 
saying his prayers under Darius, under 
Christ is Peter ; " Lord, I am ready to go 
with thee both into prison and to death." 

The fire comes down from heaven to the 
lonely righteousness of Elijah, and he kills 
four hundred of Baal's prophets; but we 
see Stephen with the dying glory in his 
face under the flying stones. No hand 



52 Zbe Sba&ow Gbrtet 



stops them. There was another way. It 
was to let Paul catch the cross- vision in 
Stephen's look and bear away the inspira- 
tion that was to save the world. The 
mouths of Daniel's lions are opened in the 
Coliseum. The flames that would not burn 
Shadrach break out at the stakes of Christ's 
disciples, and Nero's torches of Christians 
flame the light of our sweet and suffering 
gospel upon the stately walls of Rome. 

The foxes have holes and the birds of the air 
have nests, 

But the Son of Man hath not where to lay his 
head. 

The "Thou shalt not " failed. The "Thou 
shalt " failed. The gospel of bribery failed. 
They were but the gropings of the human 
spirit ; the wavering intimation of One who 
said, " I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men 
unto me." 



H am tbat U am 

Naaman was a foreigner. He did not 
see any connection between dipping in a 
particular river seven times and being cured 
of leprosy. He wondered why five times 
would not do as well. Cato would have 
thought the command trivial and unphil- 
osophic. Victor Hugo would have said 
that Elijah was lacking in a sense of hu- 
mor, and Benjamin Franklin would have 
gone down to the river and taken an analy- 
sis of the water. But it was different with 
a Hebrew. He preferred not to know why 
a thing happened. He could not see the 
connection between the blowing of trum- 
pets and the falling of the walls of Jericho. 
So it impressed him. 

4 * 53 



54 Gbe SbaDow Gbrtet 



He would have patronized a God he could 
understand. Gideon was not troubled be- 
cause he could not see the logical relation 
between lapping water with the hands and 
bravery. Napoleon would have chosen his 
three hundred men by studying them 
closely, and Xenophon would have philos- 
ophized that the men who lapped with their 
hands showed more self-control than those 
who greedily knelt down to drink, and 
would therefore make the better soldiers. 
Gideon did as he was told. He probably 
would not have done it at all if he had been 
told why. 

It was when the sun stood still that the 
sons of Abraham and Isaac were breath- 
less in their piety and overwhelmed with 
a sense of the righteousness of Jehovah. 
Amiel stands under the sky and worships 
the Creator because the sun moves on, and 
if the sun were to stand still at ten to-mor- 
row half the Christian world would begin 
to wonder if God existed, and the other 
half would for the first time be thoroughly 
convinced he did, and pray as they never 



A am tbat 1T am 55 



had prayed before. These are two influ- 
ences toward deity. 

The first Hebrew to be impressed with 
the orderliness of God was Job ; but the 
more thoughtful the Jew became in his re- 
ligion, the less hold the religion had upon 
the masses. And except with the progres- 
sive minority the proverb never had the 
force of the command. If the reasons for 
the Decalogue had been published as an 
appendix, or scattered suggestively through 
Leviticus and Deuteronomy, it would have 
honeycombed the Mosaic law with a pa- 
thetic and fatal logicalness. A god giving 
a reason would have been plaintive to a 
Hebrew. Even men did not have to give 
reasons — except to their superiors. 

They could argue with the Voice, but 
they did not expect the Voice to argue 
with them. Aristotle would have died un- 
known in Canaan. A command was the 
only syllogism that a Hebrew understood. 
It was because Moses never argued, per- 
haps, that the Lord selected him. Aaron's 
argumentative gift furnished the reasons 



56 Gbe SbaDow dbxtet 



for a Golden Calf. The reasoning people 
are largely on the wrong side in the earlier 
revelation. Pharaoh made out an excellent 
case against Moses. Moses had nothing to 
say except the ten plagues. Elijah was not 
a philosopher. He called down the fire 
from heaven ; and there is no finer scene in 
Elijah's life than when he silently throws 
his mantle upon Elisha's shoulders without 
trying to convince him of anything. No 
one but Elijah could have done it, and he 
could not have done it except with an Eli- 
sha, who was entitled to be a prophet be- 
cause with one glance into the splendid, 
silent face he knew a man. 

Balaam was full of reasons. Jonah had 
it all thought out why he should not go 
to Nineveh ; but when the Lord's spirit 
returned to him, and he was preaching in 
the streets of the city, he told them the 
facts. It was later, when at a safe and 
righteous distance he was serenely waiting 
for the city to be destroyed, that he com- 
menced to argue again, and Jehovah left 
him. " Why did not the fire come down 



f am tbat f am 57 



from heaven ? " And Jonah soon found 
himself in a naive, prophetic distress that 
the Lord would not sweep away forty thou- 
sand families in earthquake and lightning, 
to finish his argument and prove that he 
was right. 

It was an essentially matter-of-fact inspi- 
ration that held the balance of power in 
Hebrew history — one which (outside of 
the great prophets) explains every great 
popular faith and every great popular 
movement from the demand for a literal 
king to the cross of the figurative One. 
The national inspiration came from the 
blending of two facts. One was a com- 
mand, and the other a miracle. 

Right was right because God commanded 
it. He did not command it because it was 
right, and the Hebrew felt bound to a thou- 
sand duties because of the orthodox mir- 
acle he always required to help him do 
them. The obedience that came in the 
gospel because the reasons of heaven are 
shared with us, was demanded in Leviticus 
because the reasons were not shared ; and 



58 Gbe Sba&ow Cbrtet 



the miracle, which is a glorified lack of rea- 
son, was the far-off deprecating secret sym- 
bol with which the hiding human heart ap- 
proached its open God. The great sharing 
ideal had not been reached. It was a slave's 
religion. The moral philosophy of the He- 
brew was the Lord's convenience, and the 
lash of the Egyptian followed his worship 
for a thousand years. 

In its first conception being a god is be- 
ing subject to oneself, and, with all his the- 
ocratic traditions, the king was guiltily 
nearer to the Hebrew heart than the pro- 
phet, because a prophet was subject to a 
God and a king was a god — having at least 
the divinity of doing as he pleased, except 
when an unseen power interfered. Ahab 
was the logical outcome of the Decalogue. 
With the idea that righteousness consisted 
in not having one's will, the stronger a 
man was the more right he had to do 
wrong and the more inevitable it was that 
the king should be the most wicked man in 
Israel. Disobedience was but dealing with 
the Commandments in the same spirit with 



1[ am tbat 1T am 59 



which they had been written — a fulfilment 
of a choice — an ethical conception on which 
one does right for the same reason that he 
does wrong — because there is something 
stronger than he is — the very brutality of 
morals, the religious form of cowardice. 

In all the most simple concerns of faith 
and conduct, unquestioning obedience is 
but a higher form of unquestioning diso- 
bedience, still maintaining the rudimentary 
and barbaric emphasis of force. Elijah's 
argument was not with the nature of his 
hearers nor with the nature of God, and 
the four hundred dead prophets with 
which he brought his mighty service to 
a close were but the inevitable outcome 
of the doctrine he had been preaching. 
The children of Israel went to and fro on 
the scene of slaughter, looking logically 
down into dead faces for the proofs of the 
righteousness of God. The bears that 
devoured the mockers of Elisha but put 
into bear language the essential elements 
of Elisha's ethics. The leprosy of Gehazi 
was the argument for the tenth com- 



6o Jibe Sba&ow Gbrtet 



mandment. The sinfulness of adultery 
was proved by the throwing of stones, 
and the unrighteousness of murder was 
established beyond all dispute by another 
murder. 

A law which found its first appeal in not 
giving any reasons could only be reason- 
ably enforced by not giving any more rea- 
sons. The theory of ethics that was based 
on a will could only be carried out by force. 
It was the time of the unsharing One — 
the One who was God on Mount Sinai be- 
cause he would not give an account of 
Himself, and God on the Cross because 
He would. 

The life of the Messiah was not a denial 
of reason, but a definition of it, being from 
the first an exaltation both of its sinceri- 
ties and possibilities, and always of its dig- 
nity. Intuitive rather than dialectic in his 
methods, it was the very nature of his 
commands that they were insights and 
demanded insights — the seeing of reasons 
— to keep them. " I am the light of the 
world." The unquestioning obedience that 



I 



1T am tbat 1F am 61 



Moses demanded became in the Christ the 
great sharing ideal of men — the obedi- 
ence which questions, and then commands 
itself. 

The word Why is one of the keynote 
words running through His influence on 
the earth — a word around which he gath- 
ered all the tragedy and love and sor- 
row and faith and hope that made him the 
Great Experience of the world. In all his 
exasperating interviews with ignorant men, 
used as it was from the beginning to the 
end for cunning and cruelty and scoffs and 
crosses, one of the great fundamental forms 
of growth which He informed forever with 
the inspiration of His life was the ques- 
tion mark. The divinest word in the hu- 
man heart except Yes, and the only way 
to Yes, — this Why that followed Jesus — 
a word the limitations of which can only 
be known by using it, and the inspiration 
of which is living in the Mind of God. 
Perfect obedience can only be the sharing 
of a command, and through the freedom 
of many a brave and struggling question 



62 Gbe sbafcow Gbrfst 



entering at last into that divine life which 
belongs to us and to which we belong — 
the divinity of which is that it commands 
its own obedience and obeys its own com- 
mands. 

" They shall say unto me, ' What is His 
name ? ' " " And God said unto Moses, ' I AM 
THAT I AM.'" A non-committal di- 
vinity allowed but a non-committal Deca- 
logue. It was but the time of intimation. 
Jesus was the frankness of God. 



XI 

ZEbE Gentleness 1Ems /IDa&e /IDe Great 

A PROPHET is one who infers. He abides 
in the divine symbols that concentrate 
life. He is spiritual, because instead of 
needing a thousand facts for one faith, 
he gathers from every fact faiths that are 
thousandfold. The unknown wraps its 
spirit about every knowledge, and every 
experience is the symbol of what he knows 
without experience. The souls of events 
commune with him before they are born 
upon the earth. In the passion of his 
thought walk the centuries which hour by 
hour and day by day his brothers shall 
live bitterly through to know. His spirit 
comes, a figure of speech. To understand 
him is to be a nation in one's heart. He 
is the metaphor of a thousand years. 



64 Gbe SbaDow Gbrfst 



The world's dullness is its literalness. 
We know the earth by surveys and the 
sky we have learned with figures, but the 
prophecies that God would sing to us — 
one by one we grimly pace them off. They 
are trodden in sorrow into the creeds of 
men. Our religion has been seeing after- 
ward. The only prophet we fear is His- 
tory — the Brute of Truth — too actual to 
argue with, too safe in the past to crucify. 

Moses was solitary because he looked 
forward and David a minstrel of the peo- 
ple because he sang five hundred years 
of facts. In the naked might of personal- 
ity, out of oblivion itself a prophecy can 
come forth, but hundreds of years must 
visit the heart for a psalm. It took a great 
many graves for David to sing, and the 
wine of countless lives, crushed in sorrow 
and sparkling with gladness, drop by drop, 
to make songs like these. 

The people had lived. So they could 
sing. Decalogues may be drawn down 
from a cloud and delivered on stones in a 
day, but songs are not made while a bush is 



GbB Gentleness Ibas /Ifca&e /Dbe Great 65 



burning, or conceived of smoke and thun- 
der while the people wait. With great 
slow chords they come — tremulous out of 
the past — with shadow choruses they 
come, with dead hands to touch the strings 
and old souls for melodies. To prophesy 
is to anticipate a new experience ; to sing 
is to bring back the soul of old ones. God 
has two prophets for every truth : Moses 
gives the law ; David sings its life. 

The inspirations that have been founded 
in the beginning upon a solitary soul obey- 
ing a mountain must be founded now upon 
the experience of a nation with itself. It 
was a literal nation. It could not take its 
songs in advance. Its overtures are all 
solos. Note by note, life by life, Song is 
taught them. David's is an after-song. 
So it is a chorus. He sings facts. 

But the experience of the nation is the 
accompaniment, the innumerable under- 
tone, to which David sings, rather than the 
song itself. It affords him the choral ef- 
fects, those mighty antiphonals between 
the soul of a poet and the voices of his age 



66 Gbe Sba&ow Gbrist 



and people, which alone can make the 
song of his life an immortal necessity with 
men — a multitudinous truth. But as with 
all great singers, the greatest fact, the 
greatest experience to David, is himself. 

To be a great man is to be greater than 
a people, and to be a great singer is more 
than to sum up a nation in a rhapsody or 
write down its heart in a hymnal. It is to 
sing more than the nation sings. 

Truth calls to every poet: "Thou shalt 
come with me. Through shadow and sun 
I will lead thee ; with dreams I write upon 
thy face, and into thy heart I pour forever 
the Melody that dwells with me. It shall be 
thou." With the tyranny of truth the poet 
goes forth, and Life, Life, like the hand of 
God, sweeps across the spirit that he calls his 
own, and strokes from out the strings the 
strange, unwilling songs that sleep within. 
Melody will not let him go. " Yea, though 
thou art broken, O poet, and in the silence 
and the dark thou wouldst lie, thou shalt 
sing ! The day shall smite thy chords. 
In the night shall beautiful truth break in 






Gbg ©entlenees f>a$ jfflba&e Ae ©reat 67 



upon thy rest." Leading by being led, 
ordained from the beginning of the world to 
be greater than himself, with irrevocable 
beauty each new-born song locks the 
poet's old self away. If he be a singer, 
song shall sing him into a great poet. If 
he be a great poet, song shall sing him into 
a prophet — or silence shall be his — or 
the muffled way where great songs cease, 
and the great but broken voices are led to 
the forgetting-place of men. 

It came to David to be greater than 
himself. And to him who is greater than 
himself is God God. Not on Mount Sinai, 
nor in the biography of Moses, nor in a 
book, nor in a temple, but in himself, 
David worshiped. So he was a singer. 
So he was a prophet; and the greatest 
event that had taken place in Hebrew his- 
tory was the heart of a shepherd lad — a 
heart which was a continual discovery to 
itself, from the psalms the sheep knew in 
the night dews to those the people chanted 
when the king was dead, and the singer 
was borne to silence. Through a supreme 



68 abe SbaDow Gbrlst 



achievement with himself — a penitent, 
beautiful self-respect — a self-assertion as 
sweet as the trust of a child, there came 
to pass in David the first great revolution 
in the Old Testament. The God who is 
a Speaker in the Pentateuch is the Listener 
in the Psalms. The law of the gospel — 
" The Lord said unto Moses." The gos- 
pel of the law — the first of the Bethlehem 
shepherds singing on the hills a thousand 
years away with the daring of love. " Bow 
down Thine ear, O Lord, and hear me, for 
I am poor and needy, yet the Lord think- 
eth upon me. Make no tarrying, O my 
God." 

It would seem as if being a Moses were 
one of the helpless instincts of life — the 
"Thus saith the Lord." But David's ask- 
ing the Creator to listen to his thoughts 
is the mightiest acquirement of the He- 
brew spirit, and forever marks with the soul 
of the psalmist the most difficult crisis in 
the approach to God. 

The prophecy of Isaiah was supremely 
logical, and had that inspiration of inevita- 



Gb£ ©entleness 1bas Osabe flfoe ©reat 69 



bleness which the Great Spirit is wont to 
give to utterance. The coming of Jesus was 
the unfolding of the only possible plan. 
His dying on the cross was the very axiom 
of his being among men at all. His resur- 
rection was as unavoidable as his life, and 
for a Church not to have followed His mes- 
sage is as unthinkable as the discourage- 
ment of God. 

But all these have been the unfoldings, 
the refinements, the inevitable beliefs that 
came from this first victorious belief of Da- 
vid's, when, thousands of years ago, with no 
great ages to tell him the way, with the 
God of Sinai he walked the hills at night 
and dared to tell Him all his heart. 

With an artlessness that makes him 
man's immortal child, with the Awful One 
of the clouded mountain — the Thunder 
One of Moses — wandering with his hand 
in His hand, prattling of his tiny life to the 
Creator of the ends of the earth — to Da- 
vid, little one of God, great among men, was 
the mightiest, loneliest deadlift of faith, in 
the conquering of the heavens for the earth. 



5* 



70 Gbe Sbadow Gbrfst 



Belonging to a people who had assumed 
that what made authority authority at all 
was its being outside of themselves ; taught 
to look out, David dared to look in, and He 
who had appealed to men because He was 
a Pillar of Fire, appealed to David because 
he was in himself. 

The crisis which comes to every religion 
and to all art came in Hebrew history 
with this first great poet. The eternal 
issue faced the shepherd boy — the one 
that has faced every singer and every 
prophet since. It came to him either to 
found his faith upon his experience or 
upon his inexperience. Either to base his 
inspiration upon not being inspired himself, 
and fight for the experience of Moses with 
an inspiration of not believing in his own, 
or to trust himself as a man's only rever- 
ent way of trusting God, and to serve 
Moses by being a prophet too. 

David looked in. He lived within. He 
sang his life. Not a minor poet or a sub- 
Mosaic prophet, but, like Isaiah and Job and 
Jesus, giving to the world, he gave himself. 



Gb£ ©entleneaa f>a$ /fta&e dfce Great 71 



One of the great self-assertions of history, 
the first radiant, humble GOD AND I— 
the egoism of a shepherd boy becomes the 
ritual of the human heart and the dignity 
of a listening God is conferred upon the 
children of men. 



XII 

Deep Calletb TUnto Beep 

WHILE it is the power of the egoist that 
he reveals his life, he reveals no more than 
his life. David was not Solomon or Isaiah 
or Job, and he shared God's will more than 
his mind. The old boy-prayers — the out- 
door ones — with the night wind in them, 
and the sleep of lambs, and the awe of the 
sky, and the nestling communion of a child, 
he never outgrew. Even through the 
sturdier ones, to be sung with the clash of 
shields and the voices of armies, there is 
something that steals from these — David 
is always a shepherd boy when he prays. 
With the child-beauty he stamps forever 
the relation of man to God. He stands 
forth in the wise, unhappy world with a 



2>eep Calletb TOnto 2>eep 73 



philosophic innocence that has never be- 
longed to so great a man before or since. 

But he lived — this shepherd boy; a 
beautiful, revealing, singing thing — to 
live. He could not but spiritualize the 
law. Spiritualizing is experiencing, and 
thus came to pass that supreme crisis of 
the truth — the letter blossoming into the 
spirit — the law, objective in Moses, sub- 
jective in David — the mightier form of 
inspiration, the noble necessity of song, 
the heart of a shepherd, the expression of 
a world. 

And indeed, whatever the self may be, 
self- revelation from the One in the heavens 
to the singers on the earth and the men 
who live the songs, is the creative prin- 
ciple of history. Genius is the convic- 
tion of ingenuousness. Prophecy the con- 
viction that heaven listens and the earth 
waits — the helpless destiny of utterance. 
The world is not divided into singers and 
listeners. Because he could not keep still 
about himself, David became the oppor- 
tunity of God. His prayers are not cata- 



74 Gbe Sbafcow Gbtiet 



logues of desire, and there is more infor- 
mation than petition in this communion of 
the shepherd with The Shepherd. 

In the jealous, watchful silence with 
which men often walk the revelations of 
the world and hide their hearts to listen, 
past a thousand beautiful doors are they 
doomed to go that would be opened if they 
opened theirs. Though the souls that go 
to and fro before Him can never hide a 
thought, He listens, not because He needs 
to listen, but because it is divine to hear His 
children speak; and when David tells his 
Maker the quaint human thoughts that fill 
our little living here, the prayer is not for 
the prayer. It is not for God, but for 
the beautiful returns he sends to open 
places. When the heart has been emptied 
He comes. Only the singer listens. The 
self-expression of man is the self- revelation 
of God. The Incarnation — older than 
Jesus — is a habit from the beginning of 
the world. He has come to His sons not 
by hiding the human, but by calling the 
human forth and shining through it. 



Deep Calletb TUnto Deep 75 



It is night. Following silence and 
shadow and sleep into the camp, David 
listens to the breathing of Saul — the 
breath of hate when it wakes, of murder 
and pursuit, a shout across the battle — 
as innocent now as the lambs asleep in his 
fathers flocks. Destinies come and go 
across David's face — and psalms. 

One blow for a hundred wars ? 

He hears the old brooks in the hills. 
"Thy gentleness hath made me great." 
Standing over Saul to long for him, David 
saw God in himself, and when the waking 
came Saul knew at last that David must 
be king, because he had a king's heart. 

The king in the gate, peering across the 
plain — Absalom fighting for the throne — 
the messengers running — a question — a 
complete theology. " Is the young man 
Absalom safe?" 

Once he lay with his head on his arm — 
this shepherd boy, — and he watched the 
wandering flocks trooping above his sheep. 
" He would be a king ; he would have 
princes for his sons." 



76 Zbe Sba&ow Cbrist 



He had not thought of this. 

Through the heart- aches of a thousand 
years the Father-cry — the father-cry, " O 
my son Absalom, my son, my son Ab- 
salom ! Would God I had died for thee. 
O Absalom, my son, my son ! " 

The king's cry in the gate. The hailing 
of the Cross. The Fatherhood of God. 



XIII 

XRabo ©fvetb Sottas in tbe ViiQU 

One would know that David must have 
lain awake with these songs of his. The 
beautiful broken sleep of a Hebrew king 
floats down its music, and for thousands of 
years we sing, because David shared the 
shadow of the sun with the shining ones, 
and in their wakefulness remembered not 
his rest. 

O listening Night, when the children of 
mothers are born, and the children of the 
sky come forth, and the songs of the heart, 
and the Morning makes ready for Joy. 

O watching Night, when souls are un- 
locked with the dark and Silence sojourns 
with men, when the wind goes forth a 
muffled footstep of the day, and Sleep — 
from down his eternal ways — Sleep has 



78 Zbc Sba&ow Gbrfst 



come to us, and Dream — the walking of 
God through sleep ! 

O Eternal Night, O Infinite Face, bend 
low. The sun has wandered down the 
west. The tiny day has gone. Say thou 
again " Thou belongest unto Me ! I am 
Death. I am Life. I am God. Thou 
belongest unto Me ! " 

O Infinite Face, with the shadow I know 
not of and the light I cannot know, with 
the shadow I know, I come, with the 
shadow of earth I come, with David's 
prayer I come. " Bow down Thine ear, 
O Lord, for I am poor and needy, yet 
Thou thinkest upon me. Make no tar- 
rying, O my God." 

No one would care what David did after 
reading these psalms. Hamlet saw the 
king praying. If he had heard him, he 
would have forgiven him. Shakspere knew 
the manner of men too well to let the pen- 
itent words be known. It would make a 
god a God to listen one day to the world, 
and a man coulcl hardly overhear the hu- 
man heart for a thousand years without a 



TKUbo (Sfvetb Songs in tbe fttgbt 79 



divine love in him. It has been wondered 
that God could come down to the earth. 
He could not help coming. There was a 
cross because he had listened to David's 
prayers. 

It is insolent to wonder that he loves us. 
Any one would be a god who knew what 
a god knows. The one attribute of God is 
omniscience, and his virtues are the neces- 
sities of His knowledge. Rising into peni- 
tence, forgiveness, and peace, with no 
cross to make him bold, even David could 
chant in the night watches, " He delivered 
me because he delighted in me," and " I 
was shapen in iniquity and in sin did my 
mother conceive me." The transfiguration 
of Moses which the disciples thought they 
saw had happened a thousand years be- 
fore. It was the Singer in the night. 

The psalms are the real revelation of the 
Decalogue. What Moses stated, David 
sang. Commands had become prayers. 
It was the limitation of Moses that he sang 
but twice, that his song was separated from 
everything else. " I will sing unto the 



8o zbe SbaDow Gbttet 



Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously." 
The Ten Commandments were delivered to 
a silent people by a silent man. Miriam's 
song was not there. There were no re- 
sponses. The voices of men sang not 
back to God at the foot of Sinai. Singing 
had been confined to the Red Sea, but 
the Red Sea song, broken loose in David, 
sweeps the worship of Israel in his " Praise 
ye the Lord " to the very foot of the Com- 
mandment mountain, and the laws of Mo- 
ses are choruses at last, on the lips of the 
congregation. The inside of the Ten Com- 
mandments came with one who saw them 
from the inside. David was the discoverer 
of the law's heart. His way of conceiving 
duty was praise. His method of doing it 
was communion. He has not a song that 
does not pray, or a prayer that does 
not sing. This was a new thing in the 
world. It was a poet's inevitable inter- 
pretation of command, gained as a poet 
must ever gain his interpretation, through 
life itself. He sang his experience of The 
Will. It was "Thy gentleness has made 
me great." 



TOHbo ©fvetb Songs in tbe IWgbt 81 



Jesus was the Redeemer of the Old 
Testament. He saved it for us. David was 
the redeemer of Moses. The nobler sense 
of relatedness, which is the essence of the 
poetic temperament, gave to the world in 
him two mighty moods that never had 
been blended before. Saul loved to listen 
because it was king's music. The same 
fingers that found the gentle reveries of 
the immortal harp held up the head of 
Goliath before the shouts of soldiers. 

Before the darkness of a dream — beau- 
tiful dips of the harp which seem to glide 
down and down and down into the old, 
old melody that deep below life God keeps 
for the nearer ones — the melody that 
seems to sing about music that it came from 
— not yet for us. Achilles is Homer. 

Along the streets the women singing 
and dancing with tabrets, with joy and with 
instruments of music, Homer is his own 
Achilles. 

An inspiration of paradox — a soul 
which is the most intimate revelation be- 
tween the "I AM" and "He that hath 
seen Me hath seen the Father/' With 

6 



82 XLbc SbaDow Cbriat 



"sons of Abraham," "sons of Isaac," "sons 
of Jacob/' children of Israel, there is one 
name folded away with the pillar of cloud. 
There should never be the title "The son 
of Moses." Though with a David-place in 
his heart, it was not for his people to know. 
The name of God should be "The Son of 
David." 

While it was somewhat to be Homer 
and Achilles, both at once, it was the great- 
ness of the psalmist that he made men love 
him. He was the Old Testament atone- 
ment — this warrior minstrel — this king- 
poet, the singer of command, writing the 
Pentateuch over into hymns, saying his 
prayers with the Ten Commandments. 



XIV 

TPffllben tbe people Saw tbe /fountain 
Smofting Ubes Stoofc Hfar ©ff 

The second commandment was against 
idols, and the only alternative for the He- 
brew was to make an idol of the thick dark- 
ness from which the commandment was 
issued. This is what he did. The smoke- 
god was the ghost of idol worship. The 
Voice was in the darkness, and it was care- 
fully called the sign of God's presence, and 
not God himself. But when the average 
Hebrew looked up from his manna-gather- 
ing to the pillar in the sky, it was God. It 
was exactly God. 

The cloud was the first clumsy and yet 
beautiful groping of the human heart to- 
ward infinity. It was a mystery idol, 
carved by the soft airs of heaven. There 



XLbc Sba&ow Cbrtet 



were no poor trivial human outlines. It 
was the idol of the Breath of God, half of 
heaven and half of the earth, floating over 
the lives of men like a thought. Always 
to be glorious because it first caught God 
away from the stone-loving, material ways 
of the human heart, a cloud is yet but a 
cloud, a poor tiny wraith of infinity, tucked 
over a little mountain way, down under the 
worlds, on a little earth. The worlds shone 
on unrecognized. 

The essential thing about the pillar of 
fire was its nearness. It protected the 
Hebrews from the lonely stars, from the 
infinity of their God. Children crying in 
the dark, Jehovah kept a dim light burn- 
ing over them to show that he was there. 
They did not know that the night was God. 

And yet the very fear of Jehovah had 
a certain familiarity in it, the sense of a right 
to constant attention, to striking miracles. 
There is an impression of a certain haughty 
intimacy, a divine neighborliness on the 
part of the One of Sinai that no amount of 
thunder and lightning and darkness and 



Wlhen tbe people Saw tbe /fountain 85 



terror can quite remove from the early He- 
brew thought. An air of close and mu- 
tual watchfulness — at once the source of 
the moral energy and the philosophical 
childishness of the Hebrew — runs through 
all the earlier chapters of the Bible, as if 
Jehovah were experimenting with the hu- 
man nature he had made, and men were 
experimenting with him. 

There is a freshness of atmosphere as if 
nothing had ever been done before, as if 
the responsibility of sinning the first fresh 
sins in all the world came then, with the 
glow and zest not left to us, in these later 
days, when the iron monotony of evil has 
pressed down its awful commonplace upon 
the human heart, and we sin too wisely to 
sin well — too thoughtfully, with a haunt- 
ing of an inherited sadness and all the in- 
convenient convictions that reflect the ex- 
perience of men. 

Living when all the sins of which we can 
think have been used over and over again — 
when original sin is called original because 
it is not — we look back in the earlier 

6* 



86 Gbe SbaDow Gbrist 



Scriptures to a time when the originality 
of a sin was the most fascinating part of it. 
The activity of Jehovah in the Penta- 
teuch, the bustle of morality called forth 
by this creative period of immorality, is 
noticeably lessened when the sin of Israel 
has become a mere inheritance in the land 
of Canaan and the uniqueness of disobedi- 
ence has lost its bloom. God and man 
are connected in every verse. Everything 
is either right or wrong. Every word 
moralizes. In Chronicles, and through the 
bad Kings, revelation grows aloof, and 
the emphasis of prophecy is changed to 
the story of events, as if Jehovah were let- 
ting men wander as they would — weary 
of history, waiting for something worth 
while, or a man to be born like David who 
would call out His waiting love and turn 
Him toward men again — for their beauti- 
ful dreams of what they would be if they 
could. There was a time of divine retreat 
when the soul of the fathers worshiping 
their less familiar God drew closer to Him 
in the silence. He had been jealous before 



WLben tbe ©eople Saw tbe jflfcountatn 87 



Restive — He had seemed to change His 
mind, to lose His patience — a new God 
only beginning to learn how discouraging 
people were. Through all these cruder 
days the conception which emphasized His 
nearness belittled it, and He seems to have 
taken the opportunity — Infinite God — In- 
cognito — to disguise Himself for the lit- 
tle awe of men in the tawdry passions that 
they had themselves, before they knew who 
He was. 

The metaphor of a profound philosophy 
to us, Genesis was not a metaphor to the 
Hebrew, and this barbaric literalness of 
God's being almost in the next room was 
the token both of inspiration and limitation. 
The Hebrew revelation was inspired enough 
to begin at the beginning of the mind as 
well as the beginning of the world ; and 
although it has been a supposed duty to 
maintain a special private psychology for 
the Bible — to believe that it could not 
have been inspired unless it commenced in 
the middle, or commenced at both ends, or 
did not commence at all, — the idea of 



Cbe SbaDow Cbrist 



truth looking down on itself as it winds 
high and higher through its pages, has 
gained momentum enough to make us dis- 
tinctly worship God for what the children 
in the wilderness did not see. 

They did not see infinity. The God of 
their duties was not the Infinite God. 
Though the Book of Job may have been a 
poem before the death of Moses, it was 
certainly not history until after David. Full 
of the trivial-terrible, Jehovah was a more 
earnest play-god in the groping childhood 
of the human spirit. 

Before the telescope and the Sermon on 
the Mount, the compass and the thirteenth 
of Corinthians had wrought their vast and 
mutual prophecy ; before Paul and Luther 
and Galileo and Columbus and — Jesus, 
had unfolded the works and the thoughts 
of God; under the serene satire of the 
heavens in the little land of Uz, "Where 
wast thou when I laid the foundations of 
the earth," — Job became the discoverer 
of infinity. 



XV 

" Wbere Mast TTbou Mben 1T Xato tbe 
jfoun&ations of tbe Bartb?" 

But Job was more than the discoverer of 
infinity. He was the first to see the bear- 
ing of infinity on righteousness. He was 
the Moses of the sky and the earth and 
the sea. He connected the Ten Com- 
mandments with the universe. He did for 
the first chapter of Genesis what David did 
for the twentieth chapter of Exodus. He 
set it to music. He made it an incentive 
to action. 

The imagination of Job was the science 
of his day. He turned men to God through 
the natural world. It was the return of 
religion to nature, the renaissance of crea- 
tion. His heart had the further listening 
in it. He heard the voice beyond the Sinai 



90 Gbe Sba&ow Gbrtet 



voice — the Voice of the voice — when 
darkness was upon the face of the deep, 
and God out of the infinite shadow moved 
forth over the chaos of the earth, and the 
young thunders called across the new seas, 
and the " morning stars sang together, and 
all the sons of God shouted for joy." 

The Jewish law had not seemed, for the 
most part, to go back of Mount Sinai. The 
voice of God was an inland voice ; like the 
voice of man, it had a place where it be- 
longed — the cloud and darkness over a 
mountain in the wilderness. It was trivial 
with geography. It was provincial, per- 
sonal. "The Lord said unto Moses." To 
bring the Voice out of a desert in Arabia, 
to teach the world to listen to the silence 
of the sky and the whisper of the earth — 
this is the destiny of Job. He looked be- 
yond the Burning Bush. The Day was a 
Face that watched the lives of men. The 
Night was a shadow for the sleep of the 
world. 

The prelude to the Ten Commandments 
had been simply " I am the Lord thy God, 



•Wttbere TKHaat Gbou ? 91 



who brought thee out of the land of Egypt/ ' 
Egypt was enough infinity for the earlier 
Hebrew theology. Mosaic law was based 
upon an experience. The great point of 
the Hebrew was the Lord's relation to him. 
He did not care what God had been do- 
ing before. Howsoever it may have been, 
the earth had been created. Religion was 
the sublimer way of getting as much as 
possible out of it. The Lord's relation to 
others was irrelevant. The Hebrews did 
not attempt to make converts of the Egyp- 
tians. They took their jewels. Their way 
of converting the inhabitants of Canaan 
had been to destroy them, and their indif- 
ference as to God's relation to other men 
took the kindred form of an indifference as 
to God's relation to the natural world. 
Creation was irrelevant. It had occurred, 
and had no practical bearing upon what God 
would do next. The natural world was not 
an expression of Him, but something that 
he had power over, and as long as they were 
supplied with manna, and the power was 
used in their behalf, they were satisfied. 



92 £be Sbafcow Cbrtet 



Abraham was told that his children would 
be as the stars for multitude, which state- 
ment, instead of being a revelation of cre- 
ation to Abraham, was a calculation. He 
argued that Jehovah would keep his prom- 
ise because he had kept other promises. 
Job would have argued that the Lord 
would keep his promise because he was the 
Lord of the stars and promises together. 
Job was a poet. He established a new 
connection. 

The early Hebrews do not seem to have 
been interested in the Lord — as a Lord. 
They were too shrewd with Jehovah to 
understand Him. They never forgot them- 
selves. They approached Him for a pur- 
pose, and to the piety that is a mere deifi- 
cation of a contract, the Spirit is slow in 
revealing itself. Though dim suggestions 
and beautiful outlooks cannot be crowded 
out of practical things, in divine revelation, 
as in human art, the practical emphasis is 
not practical. The too eager hand belongs 
to closed eyes. We cannot know Dante 
by his account-book, nor Shakspere by 



TKHbere TKHast Zbonl 93 



his bargains with the actors, and Xantippe 
never knew Socrates, because she could 
never see him without compelling him to 
do something for her. 

The point of the Jewish character, which 
involves almost every failing, from the lie 
of Abraham to the rejection of Christ, is 
the characteristic Hebrew inability to see 
anything in an impersonal way, from God 
in the heavens to thirty pieces of silver 
in the hands of a priest. Jacob, wrestling 
with the angel of the Lord, is the type of 
Hebrew prayer — blind, splendid, indomit- 
able desire. The blessing is the God. The 
blessing is what God is for. It is the sub- 
limity of Job that his conception of duty 
was based not upon what God had done 
for him, but upon God considered as a 
God,— the wonder that he would do any- 
thing for him at all. The sublimest per- 
sonal faith in the Old Testament was based 
upon impersonality itself. For the very 
reason that God mocked him in the whirl- 
wind, " Where wast thou when I laid 
the foundations of the earth?" Job clung 



94 Gbe SbaDow Gbrist 



to Him. It is the mightier faith that is con- 
quered from despair. The peace of awe was 
upon him — the breath from the worlds. 
The skepticism of Omar Khayyam was the 
faith of Job. The worship of vastness in 
which the Persian felt it logical to lose his 
soul, was Job's way of finding his. 

" Impotent pieces of the game he plays 
Upon this checkerboard of Nights and Days ; 
Hither and thither moves and checks and slays, 
And one by one in the closet lays. 

" And that inverted bowl they call the sky, 
Whereunder, crawling, cooped we live and die, 
Lift not your hands to It for help — for it 
As impotently rolls as you or I." 

Another voice : 

" Hast thou commanded the morning since thy 

days begun ? 
And caused the dayspring to know its place ? — 
Hast thou comprehended the breadth of the 

earth ? 
Declare if thou knowest it all. 
Where is the way to the dwelling of light ? 
And as for darkness, where is the place thereof, 



TKHbere Mast Gbou? 95 



That thou shouldst take it to the bound thereof, 
And that thou shouldst discern the paths to the 

house thereof? 
By what way is the light parted — 
Or the east wind scattered upon the earth ? 
Canst thou send forth lightnings that they may go 
And say unto thee, ' Here we are ' ? " 

Singing under Omar Khayyam's sky : 

" Oh, that my words were written ! 

Oh, that they were printed in a book ! 

That they were graven with an iron pen and lead, 

They were graven on the rock forever ! 

I KNOW THAT MY REDEEMER LIVETH 

And that He shall stand at last upon the earth, 

And tho' after my skin, worms destroy this body, 

Yet in my flesh I shall see God, 

Whom I shall see for myself — 

And mine eyes shall behold and not another ! " 

— the angels of the Resurrection fifteen 
hundred years away. 

And this is Job, finding glory in being 
forgotten. With the night-light his soul 
discovered God. Under the hush thereof 

" Behold, I am vile. 
I lay mine hand upon my mouth." 



96 Zbe SbaDow Cbviet 



" I had heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear, 
But now mine eye seeth Thee." 

And Job, the inspirer of pain, the redeemer 
of sorrow, forging out of despair his mighty- 
creed, marks the transition from the child- 
hood to the manhood of faith. 

The whole human spirit struggles in this 
far-off song. The centuries met one night 
in this grand old heart. Under the empty 
sky they cried themselves out — silenced — 
sky-silenced — as long as the spirit of Job 
keeps answering in the world. For the 
few short years we sojourn under the stars 
a song shall follow them. It is Job's sky — 
and God's. 

The discoverer of a lost Creator, Job was 
the first pure, disinterested worshiper that 
God ever had. No longer a divine Con- 
venience, a Promise-Divinity, the Creator 
was rediscovered — drawn out from the tiny 
nook of faith that the desires of men had 
made for him, into His Own House. 



XVI 

Curse <5o& an& Die 

The very essence of Job's faith was its 
breadth. Breadth was its practicalness. The 
faith of Eliphaz and Zophar and Bildad was 
too narrow to cover the case. Job cries, 
" Have pity on me, O my friends. The hand 
of God hath touched me." Zophar soothes 
him : " Such is the portion of the wicked 
man. Terrors come upon him and the heri- 
tage decreed from the Mighty One." 

Job had lost his children. He had lost 
his flocks. He had lost all for whom he 
lived, and he had boils and — friends. 

Comforting a poor man in sorrow by 
telling him that he deserved it, and that 
he will have more if he does not grant that 
he deserves it, may seem satirical to the 
modern mind, but it must be remembered 

7 97 



98 Gbe SbaDowCbriet 



of the friends of Job that they not only 
began well, by sitting with him seven days 
and nights and not saying anything, but 
they offered the very best comfort, when 
they felt it dutiful to speak, that theology 
afforded at that time. 

Trained to believe that righteousness 
was remunerative and that unrighteousness 
was not, a mere glance at Job showed how 
wicked he was, and seven days and nights 
of watching his suffering could only deepen 
the impression that came when they had 
first heard that he had lost his property — 
that he must have been a very doubtful 
character, in spite of appearances, from the 
first. This was their theology. It was the 
test of their orthodoxy that they were on 
the side of the lost she-asses and the boils. 
They very truly said that they could not 
do differently — they and the Lord. It was 
the Mosaic conception of duty and its 
reward. Job was a most unquestionable 
heretic. He did not have a shadow of 
precedent in his favor. Seven deaths, and 
a missing fortune, the Sabeans and their 



Curse ©oD anfc 2>ie 99 



swords, fire and wind, were their argument, 
and a wife, with her " Curse God and die." 

The real grandeur of Job was his impa- 
tience. His humility before God is but the 
more beautiful side of his anger with his 
friends, and his self-abasement before his 
Maker is the crowning dignity of a self-re- 
spect which is one of the epics of the world. 
The only proof he had of his righteousness 
was himself. And he bowed before his 
Maker and believed in Him because he 
dared to believe in that self against hail and 
fire and death and the words of men and 
the fear of their prim little dogma-god. 
" My righteousness I hold fast and will not 
let it go " — the parable of every hero ; won- 
derful now, but more wonderful then, when 
Job fought the mighty fight alone, and 
went before us all down through sorrow to 
the heart of God. 

His maintaining his righteousness in the 
face of evil was the shadow of the Messiah. 
Christ did not argue about the cross. He 
died on it. The argument was in Job. Isaiah 
prophesied the glory of suffering — the suf- 



Zbc SbaDow Cbrist 



fering of the righteous; Job proved it in 
his life, Christ with his death. The whole 
Hebrew faith had been put into a honey- 
comb of special providences, and with all 
this array of disaster the friends of Job 
either had to give up Job's righteousness 
or God's; either believe that every detail of 
good and evil that happened to them was a 
special providence, which was religion ; or 
special improvidence, which was atheism. 

It was because Job would do neither that 
he struck out a new path and won the free- 
dom of God — the right to bring evil upon 
those he loved; one of the first instances in 
the world in which breadth was more prac- 
tical than narrowness. Job was the discov- 
erer of a practical faith which would stand 
the test of life, because he was the first 
to take God's point of view — to see that 
in the nature of the case it must be a uni- 
verse ; that a God whose point of view was 
not the universe would not be a God at all. 

Infinity was gained with its perspective. 
It was something more than an ornament 
of Deity — a poetic invocation. It was God 



Curse <3ofc an& 2>ie 101 



himself living into a vast system in which 
every soul and sorrow and blessing had its 
place. The dovetailing of rewards into one 
little existence — the whole creation a body- 
servant for aworthy Jew — Job had the sub- 
lime humor of every greater poet, and the 
Little God who does little things for little 
men to gain a little faith for a little time, 
puttering with their egotism to win their 
souls, vanished. The egotism which is the 
religion of the little man when he succeeds, 
the infidelity of the little man when he fails, 
the " I," which is the essence of littleness, 
which is the blasphemy alike of creeds and 
curses and prayers and sneers, met its sub- 
lime, eternal, triumphant rebuke in Job. 

Though living under a false astronomy, 
he had just that quality of selflessness in his 
worship which would have made him sur- 
mise that the universe was not made to 
revolve around the earth as a center, or 
especially arranged to furnish heat and star- 
light to the Land of Uz. Such a discovery 
on Job's part would have been but the 
astronomical form of his theology. 



io2 Cbe Sbafcow Cbriet 



With the star measurements to measure 
himself and suggest his immeasurable God, 
Job did not expect the universe to be pre- 
occupied with his estate, and performed his 
duty without requiring it. 

He was too spiritual to have a Land of Uz 
God, or a Job's God, or a Jews' God. With 
their tiny, compacted, Land of Uz faith, 
his friends gathered around him, and ac- 
cused him of blasphemy because God was 
so much more of a God to him than to them ; 
because he gave Him room and gave Him 
time — the prerogatives of a God ; because 
he saw that even a God was not divine 
enough to have a thousand centers, or hinge 
infinity on Uz. 

With a breadth of conception that made 
the Creator nearer as well as farther, Job 
found in the vast itself the homelikeness the 
infinite alone can afford for our struggling 
human faith ; the peace that passeth all un- 
derstanding — peace just because it passeth 
all understanding. Eliphaz had to under- 
stand. He could have but the peace that 
comes a little at a time, as understanding 



Curse (5oD and 2>fe 103 



comes, and that moves away when under- 
standing goes. The Infinite is the only rest 
the finite has. Job rested in it. 

From the point of view of Eliphaz and 
Zophar, infinity in a God was unpractical. 
It was vague — the nebula of divinity. It 
had nothing definite to grasp. The men of 
Uz could not be governed by the aurora 
borealis. In the burning of a city, the re- 
course of Eliphaz was the Sodom hypothesis 
— an hypothesis which, like all narrowness, 
was very practical from one side, if, con- 
sidering the sins of men, one ignored, on 
the other, that the least a logical God 
could do would be to burn the city over 
every year. The doctrine of Eliphaz by its 
irreverent definiteness was the greatest prac- 
tical encouragement toward wickedness in 
his day. A motive for righteousness which 
required constant fires could hardly be prac- 
tical in a world which could only be kept 
burning part of the time. Only a broader 
law applying before a fire as well as after, 
would be worthy of a jurist, or a God. 

Thousands of miles of telegraph would 



io4 Gbe SbaDow Cbriat 



have been scientific proof with which to 
balance the striking of his flocks by light- 
ning ; but Job was a poet. He could take 
for granted. Mystery was a conviction in 
his theology, and humbleness, and giving 
God the benefit of a doubt, and when the 
great wind smote his sons, he did not need 
several thousand years of windmills and 
the sails that discovered the New World, 
to be sure that God's arrangements were 
best, or sure that wind had suddenly be- 
come a personal affront, had come from the 
ends of the earth across snows and seas to 
rebuke a man named Job. Job was practi- 
cal because he was broad. He had a definite 
solution for the struggle of life because he 
was vague. Mystery was the conviction 
that made his theology at once the sublim- 
est and most practical conception of the 
living One. 

He was the first to give God time, the 
first to give Him room, the first to see His 
long looks, His glances of a thousand years. 
Out of the treasuries of the snow, the guid- 
ing of mornings and wandering of nights, 



Curse <Bofc anfc Bfe 



105 



and all the vast and beautiful care of the 
infinite heart, Job learned the awe that was 
to make his faith one of the mighty memo- 
ries of men. 

Thus he was the emancipator of right- 
eousness, the inspirer of pain. He shall be 
remembered as the redeemer of sorrow, one 
who could sing with a cross ; one who lifted 
duty above reward and degraded sin be- 
low punishment, because he discovered the 
infinity of God, because he lost himself in 
the wideness of His ways. 



XVII 

2>otb Hot XKHisbom Grs an& mn&et> 
standing put ffortb 1ber IDofce? 

SOLOMON could not keep the Proverbs. 
So he wrote them. The founder of moral 
philosophy — the duty which Moses stated 
and David attempted, Solomon explained. 
Morality passed into its motto stage. 

But the prayer at the dedication of the 
temple must be read with the eleventh 
chapter of Kings. 1 And " Without me ye 
can do nothing." 

A book with a less inspired conception 
than the Bible, of religion, and therefore of 
art, following the more common human in- 
stinct, would have suppressed this chapter 
in Kings. Solomon's literary executors, 

1 But King Solomon loved many strange women . . . 
and his wives turned away his heart. 

106 



Dotb *Kot TKMs&om Gty ? 107 



seeing that it would jar upon the artistic 
unity of his work, would have arranged 
the writing of his biography with decorous 
deceit. It would have had all those un- 
prophetic omissions that belong to the nar- 
rower idea of beauty and the smaller artists' 
cowardice of life. The readers of Proverbs 
for thousands of years would have inno- 
cently longed to be like Solomon. The 
world would have been set back in its spirit- 
ual achievement for an indefinite period, 
and all those reserves of knowledge which 
come of knowledge experiencing itself, would 
have been lost. Confidently working upon 
the impossible, full of the glad conscious- 
ness that the Proverbs were the solution of 
moral effort; in the blind, crude ways of 
life would the world have learned that 
there had been a lie somewhere — a moral 
romance — that had to be suffered and suf- 
fered away from the human heart — be- 
cause the perfect finish of Solomon's art 
had been preserved. 

To the sublime literary morality of the 
Bible we are indebted for the fact that the 



io8 Zbc Sbafcow Cbriat 



most valuable contribution that Solomon 
made to us was not thus sacrificed — the 
comment of the eleventh chapter of Kings 
upon the three thousand Proverbs. Called 
the wisest man in the world because he re- 
pented in bons mots, because no one has had 
so gifted a repentance since, Solomon will be 
immortal in the minds of men, because of his 
consummate literary longing to have them 
do wrong more wisely. Eloquence is not 
having what we want, but wanting it. Wis- 
dom is the art of demanding that others 
shall do better than ourselves. A proverb 
is saying what we wish we had done, or 
hoped that we would, and all the wise say- 
ings that stretch their dainty rhetoric over 
our naked lives are the inventories of our 
ignorance — the retrospect of the beauty 
we have lost. 

The great Redeemer Satire of the Old 
Testament, Solomon comes to us the cli- 
max of the bitter truth — the human heart 
waiting with words, bitterly with words — 
with words — outside of the gates of Beth- 
lehem. Giving to the Hebrews a larger 



2>otb mot TKIUe&om Grg? 109 



assortment of thoroughly understood sins, 
and no inspiration to avoid them, except 
an ironical life — "I have not kept these 
Proverbs; how much less chance there is 
for you, who cannot even say them " — this 
was the mission of the wisest man in the 
world. 

And yet that it was better for men to 
do wrong intelligently than ignorantly, this 
passing phase of mottoes shall stand as 
one of the records of God. The moral 
philosophy which had been simply God's 
convenience, came to an end in this ques- 
tioning and observing of life. Solomon 
went back of the divine will to the nature 
of things. Bringing the Law out from the 
mere authority of One in whom a man 
might believe or might not, he surrounded 
it with the authority of this actual world, 
in which a man has to live, whatever he 
believes. It was the discovery of reason- 
ableness, of what might be called the mind 
of God. 

The natural rudimentary Mosaic attitude 
toward a fire — not that it blisters, but that 



no Zbc Sba&ow Gbrtet 



it has been said, " Thou shalt not touch it," 
— finds its supplement in Solomon ; and the 
higher obedience, based upon knowledge, in 
the brilliant son of David comes to its first 
great emphasis. Philosophy was the study 
of blisters. 

Discovering a larger man, as Job had dis- 
covered a larger God, he represents a hu- 
manist movement, the turning of man to 
himself — the self- discovery which wrought 
out as a habit of thought the identity of 
the moral law with the nature of man. A 
teacher of the experiences of morality, Solo- 
mon connected the mystical voice of Sinai 
with the conscience of every day, and the re- 
ligion of what they knew about themselves 
as well as the religion of what they had been 
told about their God was given to the race. 

But the higher value of Solomon's reign 
was not this. It is only by standing in 
the ruins of his temple that we can worship 
there, can read in the mighty, broken out- 
lines the truth at last. Built with proverb 
and stone and gold, it is one of the great 
half-truths of history, completed alone by 



2>otb mot XKMe&om Gt£? in 



being half destroyed. The Saracen in fierce 
unconsciousness was to become the inter- 
preter of Solomon, bringing to its logical 
conclusion in the dust of the earth the gos- 
pel of the eleventh chapter of Kings. 

At once the discoverer of moral philos- 
ophy as the theory of heaven and the way 
to hell, Solomon is the immortal illustration 
of the merely moral man — not that he was 
moral, or that the merely moral man is ever 
moral, but that he is impossible. The oft- 
recurring type of the broad and under- 
standing man who enlarges the area of the 
truth without having life enough to cover 
it, finds its great original in one who sub- 
stituted reasonableness for righteousness 
and forgot God in building a temple for 
Him. 

The history of the human race is the 
Brobdingnag biography of every unknown 
soul. The passing phases of our lives are 
the old shadows of these mightier destinies 
that have crossed our world, to prove with a 
classic tragedy what we know with a pass- 
ing thought. 



ii2 Gbe Sba&ow Cbrtst 



Nations have been born and lived and died 
to furnish the moral philosophy of a child, 
of an afternoon. With a thousand years 
and a million sorrowing hearts tucked into 
his epigrams, Solomon himself shall be to us 
an unforgotten proverb — a great experi- 
ence of the world. Writing a book which 
has the distinction of being the only book 
in the Bible that every one outgrows, his 
appeal is to the time of crudeness, when 
observation is still piety and the will not 
yet unmasked, still proud of its trim om- 
nipotence. In the time of spiritual glib- 
ness and dogmatic confidence, in the zest 
of our ignorance, we conjure inspiration out 
of Proverbs and dream of life, but to life 
itself must always come the wondering 
humbleness of the New Testament. To live 
is yet to look back upon Solomon's sayings 
with sad wonder at ourselves. With their 
tiny courtly glory in the struggle of the 
years, they but linger by the name of Christ 
— dim, pathetic decorations on the stern- 
ness and the realness and the silence of the 
cross. 



2>otb IRot THUteDom Gr£? 113 



David was not a philosopher, and Solo- 
mon would have patronized the childishness 
of his father's faith, but the Son of God was 
called the son of David because Solomon 
was not ; and the only value of the temple 
that the wise king built, was that his father's 
prayers would be prayed there, that long 
after the stately obviousness of the Proverbs 
had become an old ornament in the world, 
the songs of David's spirit should be upon 
the lips of the nations as far as sin and long- 
ing and hope and fear have reached their 
cries upon the earth — the wise earth — the 
wearily-wise earth — the hungering and 
thirsting earth — parched with proverbs — 
dying with epigrams — waiting for God. 



XVIII 

Wanits! tDanitp! HU is Danftp 

ECCLESIASTES is the text-book of suicides. 
Though not without hope, the hope is a 
gilded discouragement, lighting the world 
to show how dark it is. Only in a book 
as supremely victorious as the Bible could 
such an appealing and beautiful prophecy of 
despair be safely printed. It is the shadow- 
song of the earth. It is the masterpiece of 
the Night. It is the culmination of the 
Proverbs and the lives of the kings. " As 
when a hungry man dreameth and behold 
he eateth, and he waketh and his soul 
is empty." Sadder than David's Psalms, 
because they had tears ; sadder than death, 
because there was no death, it is the confes- 
sional of wisdom, and through its wonder- 
ful lines, hallowed with a broken heart, the 

114 



IDanfts! lt)anit£l Bll is Wanftg 115 



restless spirit of man shall move forever to 
find in its forbidding fellowship, its sublime 
self-pity, the Miserere of the world. Even 
when the poet comes to his climax and 
struggles toward joy — " Rejoice, O young 
man. Remove sorrow from thine heart," — 
the Gloria strives for its voices in the song of 
youth only to modulate into death, death, 
death, " When the mourners go about the 
streets and the dust returns to the earth as 
it was and the spirit to God who gave it." 
" Vanity ! Vanity ! All is vanity ! " — the 
litany of philosophy, closing at last with its 
saddest sentence, "All hath been heard," 
in the middle of the Bible. 

The pitiful attempt at a New Testament, 
Ecclesiastes is the caricature of a Proverb 
straining to be a cross. The immortal argu- 
ment of the merely moral man confuted by 
himself, it marks at once the beginning of 
moral philosophy as a contribution to man- 
kind, and the end of moral philosophy as 
the solution of human life. 

The author of Ecclesiastes, whoever he 
may have been, was a man like men : a uni- 



n6 zbc Sba&ow Cbnat 



versal man. The last testament of a man 
of affairs — a scholar, a seer, a diplomat, a 
lover, — it cannot be set aside as the dis- 
couraged wisdom of a monk or the pessim- 
ism of an aloof life. 

I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, 
By the roes and the hinds of the fields, 
That ye stir not up nor waken love 

— the wooing strain in the song of Solo- 
mon floats softly through all the lines of 
what must ever stand as the most experi- 
enced book in the Old Testament ; the very 
force and completeness of which is alto- 
gether lost if it is not the symphony of a 
wonderful and various life. The love-song 
motif, "Awake, O North Wind, and blow 
thou South!" like the ghost of a brighter 
melody through the mighty minor chords 
that sing the weariness of the world, winds 
ever like a beauty that is lost, not by being 
overlooked, but by having been lived down 
through to bitterness. " One generation 
goeth and another generation cometh, and 



IDanftB! IDanftg! Bll is IDanfts "7 



the earth abideth forever," and the minor 
chords, and " That which hath been is that 
which shall be, and that which is to be hath 
already been, and God seeketh again that 
which hath passed away." 

" All hath been heard." The voices are 
still and the world sleeps and dreams and 
waits. The hush of darkness is upon it. It 
is the starlight Revelation. 

No man knoweth. The morning comes 
at midnight — only to God. 



8* 



XIX 

XCbe Sba&ow Cbrist 



It was a most startling hypothesis that 
came to the unknown Isaiah : " If God were 
to come to Judea and live, what kind of 
man would he be?" 

To be original is to discover the com- 
monplace of a thousand years — to face at 
first the sneer that no one would have 
thought of it, and at last the indifference 
because any one would. He who thinks a 
mighty thought weaves him an immortal 
shroud. Fame is the beginning of forget- 
ting. To be great is to take one of the 
habits of the gods — to move everywhere 
unknown — to be accorded the world for a 
burial-ground — to be a spirit, a thought 
— to breathe through the unnamed winds. 
To be great is to be capable of becoming 



Zbc SbaDow Gbrtet 119 



as commonplace as the rustling of the 
leaves, and sunshine, and Christ. It shall 
need a prophet to tell who a prophet was 
— to distill his spirit out of the souls of men. 
He shall be a wraith, gathered out of life 
like the morning mists. Men shall strive 
to divine his face, shall paint and sing 
— shall seek to say, "This is he"; but out 
of the Dust and the Spirit he came. To 
the Spirit and the Dust he shall return. 

Immortality has been the romance of 
little men thrumming their harps in a little 
age. Out of the ground itself has science 
brought its mighty measure. It shall be 
a silent word. With his tinsel little thou- 
sands of years, there is one who sings the 
loves of a woman in Troy. His name is 
called immortal. With the pantomime of 
history flocking through his heart, there is 
one who sings the coming of the love of 
God, and the generations ask, " What is 
his name ? Where was his abiding-place ? 
Who knew him first?" And the answer 
shall be to every man : " His name shall 
be upon thy forehead. The spirit in thine 



i2o XLbc Sbafcow Cbrtet 



eyes shall be to him for a name. Its se- 
cret shall be life." 

A prophet shall be the world itself. His 
breath shall blow from the seas. His im- 
mortality shall be nameless — like the im- 
mortalities of God — through the passing 
of flowers and suns. He shall be a convic- 
tion. He shall be a habit among the sons 
of men. About his spirit we shall build the 
faint and curious scaffoldings of history — 
that we may strive to rebuild his life. We 
shall gather from afar the tokens of his time 
— the pathetic little heaps — the dust of 
research. We shall blow it wisely in each 
other's eyes ; but we shall not know — that 
greatest knowledge of all — that knowledge 
of how knowledge came — that knowledge 
of how it was before the knowledge came; 
or guess but dimly that mighty day when 
the Incarnation Truth was fresh in the heart 
of a man — fresh as the face of the earth 
when God gazed down that Creation morn- 
ing, when He unfolded it out of darkness 
and loved it first. 

We shall never know how dark it was nor 



Gbe SbaDow Gbrist 121 



how light the light was, when, like a vast 
conjecture — amorphous, terrible, beautiful, 
tender, infinite, in the spirit of one who 
dreamed, there loomed the great Redeemer- 
Dream and sounded the chorus of all the 
earth — when to the first disciple of Jesus, 
hundreds of years away, there came as 
generations coming with oratorios on their 
lips: 

Hast thou not known ? Hast thou not heard? 
Hath it not been told thee from the beginning? 

It is the everlasting God — the Lord — the 
Creator of the ends of the earth — 

then the sudden silence — the Isaiah silence 
— and the sweetest, strangest solo in all the 
world singing like a little child's heart: 

He shall feed His flock like a shepherd; He 
shall gather the lambs in His arms and carry 
them in His bosom, and gently lead those that 
are with young. 

The time of the blending of a human 
song with the music of the spheres, when 



i22 Gbe SbaDow Cbrfet 



Isaiah caught the longing of God from the 
stars — when he knew the divinity of His 
coming down — bitterly and completely 
down — to the love of Mary and the cry 
on the Cross. 

The more beautiful Bethlehem was in 
Isaiah's heart. Like the Wise Men of the 
East, Moses and Job and David had brought 
their offerings there, and in the synthesis 
of the three great conceptions of God — in 
the wonder of their being together — the 
book that is called Isaiah is the struggle of 
the world's dream — the Saviour sleep — the 
unwaked New Testament. 



XX 

Zbe Sba&ow Cbrist 

ii 

A GREAT man is one who makes the world 
greater to find room for himself. A thou- 
sand years to him and God are but as yes- 
terday when it is passed. He has the mimic 
omnipresence of a soul wont to walk under 
the eaves of heaven with the Maker of the 
earth. The mighty one of every era is thou- 
sands of years away from those who dwell 
with him, and all the great men of the scat- 
tered years are nearer to each other than 
to the dates that gossip on their tombstones 
— the little difference that it makes when 
they are born, or the figures that tell us 
when they could not die. 

The hero's solitude is his fellowship with 
heroes. From the years to the east and 
the years to the west they come. The paths 

123 



i24 £be Sba&ow Cbrfst 



are short between the centuries, when, 
seeking their mighty kindred, the great go 
forth to visit in a prophet's heart ; and from 
the beginning of the world transfiguration 
is the habit, the secret of every colossal 
life. " Live, O my mighty brother/' the 
Secret says, "live in the littleness about 
thee, doomed to the dullness, gentle with 
the pain. When the empty roar is stilled 
and over the dear blind makers of the Noise 
shall reach the great soft hand of Sleep — 
there shall be the sound of coming — the 
gathering of thy brothers from afar; in the 
peace above the world shalt thou walk 
with them. In the trysting-place of pro- 
phets thou shalt touch their hands. From 
their eyes thy soul shall drink. As the 
night gathers the dew, their thought shall 
descend upon thee — glistening, refreshing, 
full of morning love; it shall be to thee 
for solemn delight — the faith for thy sac- 
rifice. It shall be the word thou shalt 
speak when the Dawn and thou go down 
between the hills. Thou shalt not look 
back nor falter. Thy brotherhood with 



Zbe Sba&ow Gbrfst 125 



prophets shall be to live without them. It 
shall be to believe in the greatness of lit- 
tle men — calling to it — pleading with it. 
Whether it come to thy face or to thy 
cross or to thy grave, their greatness shall 
be for thy greatness — created out of thy 
heart, humbled with thy sorrow, builded 
into the world.' ' 

The " Comfort ye, comfort ye, my peo- 
ple " was the Unknown Isaiah's way of 
coming down from transfiguration. 

Going to and fro, looking into every face 
for a hero, demanding, expecting, chal- 
lenging, believing, Isaiah prophesied the 
Christ. Across the souls of his brothers 
he saw Him coming. Out of the east, out 
of the west, out of the north and the south, 
out of sorrow and exile and desire and de- 
spair — the gathering of God — to be born 
in Bethlehem. The Wise Men saw the star 
in the East and came across the deserts to 
the birth. Isaiah saw it in the spirit of 
men. He was in Gethsemane. The cry 
of the mob and the cry on the cross were 
convictions in the struggle of his life. His 



i26 Gbe Sba&ow Cbrlet 



prophecy was the irrevocable insight of 
love. The Night gathered as he gazed 
upon men. Tenderly and softly over his 
glowing thoughts, the Christ- spirit came — 
the hush, the Shadow, the Cross. It was 
no fragmentary, unconnected, beautiful rev- 
erie of sadness, coming like a voice on the 
air to be noted down with a pen. It was 
not a reported prophecy. It was life itself. 
It was his coming down from a transfigu- 
ration, it was the more actual, intimate 
prophecy — written on the street. Look- 
ing into his brothers' eyes he wrote it. He 
saw that the denials of Peter were there, 
that the stripes of Pilate could not be 
helped, and that Philip's cruel question 
was eternal upon the lips of men. He 
knew. He utterly knew — that on an 
earth where even a man could not be great 
without a sorrow, a God without a cross 
would not even be a man. 

It was no great outside angel's voice 
leaning over his trembling body and tell- 
ing him to write. It was no journalistic 
divining of events, no inspired information 



Gbe Sba&ow Cbriat 127 



of circumstance. It was a profound expe- 
rience with the nature and law of life — a 
colossal judgment of the human race. 

Gazing into its grandeur and its coward- 
ice, he saw the inevitable conflict there. 
Out of the human heart itself deciphered 
the Creator's Secret for this earth — the 
passion of history — the Gethsemane — the 
Truth. 



XXI 

Ube Sbafcow Cbtfst 

in 

ISAIAH'S transfiguration — his talking with 
Jesus across the generations — his outreach - 
ing through the future for a Man, was but 
the half of his prophecy. There have been 
candidates for prophets and candidates for 
saviours. There have been great-men-elect 
— natures that have conquered the forty 
days' fast and the temptation with Satan — 
who could not put their transfigurations 
behind them — and failed. Poets may live 
in transfigurations. Prophets will not. They 
may go there to rest — as Christ with Moses 
and Elias — to be soothed a little, to feel 
the coolness and the peace of God's hand, 
that it may touch for a moment the fever 
on their brows. Then to work. 

The mingling of a transfiguration and a 



Zbe Sba&ow Gbrfst 129 



fact makes a prophet possible. The look- 
ing for a Man now makes him inevitable. 
Poetry may be truth. Prophecy is where 
truth connects with the next thing to do. 
It is the sad end of the truth, but it is the 
end where heroes are, where ideals are ideal- 
ized into facts, where great men, struggling 
for their faith, reach up their holy hands as 
though they would fasten the skies to the 
earth, as though with their very crosses they 
would hold them low for the prayers of men. 
The forgetful transfiguration may be more 
beautiful than the applied one — the foreign 
beauty, the unrighteous beauty of peace 
when there is no peace ; but Isaiah prophe- 
sied the incarnation because incarnation 
was the habit of his life. He speaks the 
truth for all times because he was trying 
to find a truth big enough for his own — 
and build it there. This is the essential 
fact about the essential prophecy of his- 
tory. It was incarnation that conceived 
Incarnation. 

The bare idea of having a Messiah turns 
upon the Isaiah experience without one — 



i3° Wbe Sbafcow Gbrtst 



the fierce intentness of a practical struggler 
with a nation, forced into prophecy by the 
problem of life — the problem that comes 
to all of us, as, out of the sad and scat- 
tered years, comrades of the sun and com- 
rades of the grave, we walk between them, 
this one great question ringing in our ears 
through the irrevocable days : " Shall we 
be impossible gods, poor wistful gods, half- 
created gods, on this earth of men ; or shall 
we not ?" — the challenge of the incarnation. 
To accept it is to live with the divine, the in- 
finite, the unattainable, striking its splen- 
did sorrow through all our deeds — beau- 
tiful, incomplete, glorious, defeated, dying. 
To refuse it is to mumble a love of what 
we dare not be, and call it worship. It is 
to whimper for a better world and call it 
religion. It is to be abdicated gods, be- 
cause divinity has no chance withal, because 
there are no conveniences for heroes on the 
earth. 

When our hearts are in tumult, and we 
are cast down, the incarnation challenge 
comes. When the day is over, when our 



Zbe Sba&ow Cbrfst 131 



brother has returned us hate for love, dull- 
ness for insight, when he has cursed the 
dearest we could give, we shall go forth 
to the calm and absent-looking sky. We 
shall say : " It were simple to be a God — 
safe beyond the stars/' From the vast 
resting-places in the deep the winds shall 
come to us. They shall blow upon the 
fever in our faces and we shall say : " It 
were simple enough to be a God — off 
where the winds begin ; to be a God alone, 
to be a monk- God, with a universe for a 
hermitage, with worlds for infinite retreat ; 
but to be a god here, to have a god's 
desires and a man's chance — to be mock- 
ingly eternal and cabined in days and 
nights, — to be infinite and dream stars, and 
be riveted down to the ground, — to have 
wings of love and be fastened to hate and 
wedded to blindness and mingled with 
beasts and harried hither and thither in the 
great unseemly shambles, where men think 
they live and do not even learn to die, and 
where they curse, and cast their souls into 
the filth, and trample their brothers under 



132 Zbe Sbafcow Cbrtet 



their feet for the filth itself, and burn their 
heroes at the stake ! Safe in infinity, with 
all Space in which to be Himself, shall a 
God who has made the worlds as He wished 
them to be require a man to be a god in 
a world which he did not make, a world 
which he did not choose, a world where to 
undertake to be a man is more than a god 
would care to do ?" Thus the incarnation 
challenge comes. 

It were indeed a god's world, framed for 
heaven, with its vast delights, bounded by 
skies and singing its own music day unto 
day. With one's own soul listening in it, 
it were easy to be a god alone — to let 
the links of light and the links of darkness, 
of song and starlight and sleep, fall across 
the years and bind us to its joy forever. 
It were easy to be a god thus — or to be a 
god with gods, — to troop through the vales 
of the earth and look into each other's 
souls; but to be a god with men? 

The problem of every soul when the 
sons of God go forth to live. 

Therefore God's problem — the struggle 



Zbe SbaDow Cbiiet 133 



with environment. The Messianic answer 
was the conviction of history, the gath- 
ered voice of the human race, exalted 
into the utterance of one who prophesied 
the Messiah because to him a God who 
would ask of His creatures more than 
He would do Himself would not be a God 
at all. 

Thus came to pass the tremulous gospel 
— the writing of John across the soul of 
Isaiah. 

" In the beginning was the Word and the 
Word was with God and the Word was 
God and the Word was made flesh and 
dwelt among men." 



XXII 

XCbe Sba&ow Cbrfst 

IV 

The righteousness of God had been con- 
ceived before. Moses had bound it about 
the soul. His fatherhood had been con- 
ceived. David had sung it into one of 
the habits of Hebrew life. Job had made 
it an infinite fatherhood. Ethics had been 
thought out as a science. Men had con- 
ceived of a man in God's place for thou- 
sands of years. The man had been their 
God. Isaiah was a poet and conceived of 
a God in a man's place. The turning of 
this thought was the crisis of the world. 
Henceforth worship, which had been an 
effort — a scattering, an outgoing of the 
human heart into the Vast, a spreading of 
our little prayers across the sky — should 
be an incoming, a shining down. The in- 



Zhe Sbafcow Cbtiet 135 



carnation was the concentration of God — 
the decree that the infinite should be the 
neighborhood of life. 

But the greater idea, in its divine neces- 
sity, its logicalness, was not Isaiah's idea 
of having a Messiah. It was his idea of 
what He would be when He came: the in- 
credible conception that when the Maker 
of the earth descended, He would be de- 
spised and rejected of men — the sublimest 
accusation of history, the supreme satire 
upon the human race, the most beautiful 
and awful reach of insight the world has 
known. 

It was the intense humanness of this 
divinest prophet which alone could have 
anticipated the divinity, not of God's being 
a God, but the greater divinity of His being 
a man ; His giving up a God's opportuni- 
ties, His being a struggling God, with the 
little human outfit of Space and Time and 
Circumstance with which He asked Isaiah 
to be a prophet for Him and Peter to die 
for Him. There came to the vision of the 
seer, the Cross — the Consistent Creator — 



136 Gbe SbaDow Cbrt5t 



showing to the human heart what He really 
was. Approaching his conception out of 
the atmosphere of the God of Israel in- 
stead of the memory of the Saviour Himself, 
Isaiah's anticipation bears within it a sense 
of the divine sacrifice so profound, so mas- 
terful, so full of praise and onwardness, of 
vast, exultant sorrow, that it sweeps its glo- 
rious tides into the New Testament itself, 
where the soul of Isaiah overflows and 
breaks its prophecies upon the words of 
Paul and fills the very presence of Christ 
with the fullness of the past. 

It is too much to expect that a man great 
enough to prophesy a Messiah should have 
been at hand to interpret him when He 
came, but one cannot but wonder how much 
more the gospel of Luke would have re- 
vealed of the soul of Christ if it had been 
written by one who understood Jesus with- 
out seeing Him, instead of one who did not 
understand Him when he did ; and while 
the cruelty of the love that was offered 
Christ was the supreme necessity of an 
honest incarnation, one cannot but wonder 



Gbe SbaDow Cbtiat 137 



whether " the things I have yet to say unto 
you, but ye cannot bear them now," would 
not have been spoken, if there had been one 
great heroic soul endowed with habits and 
insights that would comprehend — to stand 
between this farewell talk, this pitiful re- 
serve of Jesus and the human heart. 

But the sound of the truth shall not be 
lost. It matters not. With the tide and 
the sun God brings it back. If the great 
listener be not at hand, his soul shall gather 
the murmur out of the ages as the shell 
gathers the sea. Luther takes the keys 
out of Peter's hands and Isaiah hears the 
Beatitudes in his grave, — one before whose 
father-messiah spirit the blundering pea- 
sants who walked with Jesus shall be as chil- 
dren forever, before whose majestic vision 
the inspired insight of the great apostle to 
the Gentiles becomes but the beautiful 
makeshift of the day, in the crisis of the 
kingdom on the earth. 

Does no one feel the dim stirring, the 
sense of what it would have been, if but 
one of Paul's epistles could have been as- 



138 Gbe SbaDow Cbrfet 



signed to Isaiah — if he who wrote the 
mighty fore-word had left but one gentle 
retrospect — if he who spoke the sublimely 
unfulfilled had sung the fulfillment itself? 
We may go, it is true, through all history 
with our wistful " might have beens." All is 
answered and answered once for all, by the 
divine was. We may dare to reconstruct 
the past, because it is safe from our petty 
hands ; but to ask what Paul would have 
written had he been in Isaiah's place ? Con- 
jecture is the huge shadow-measurement 
of men. Against its flickering outlines we 
may lift a soul and trace its greatness on 
the lives of heroes and the thoughts of God. 
Would Paul have prophesied the Christ — 
barely convinced by the Christ Himself? 
Would he have written anything at all, in 
that hopelessness which was Isaiah's op- 
portunity ? Paul was one who held gar- 
ments while Isaiahs were being stoned. 
He belonged to the second order of great 
men — those who see afterward. The su- 
preme great man of the divine visit to the 
earth, wrapped in his thousand years, side 



XLbe SbaDow Cbrtet 139 



by side with Peter, who knew him yester- 
day, Isaiah walks. Through his radiant 
New Testament soul, past the metaphysics 
of Paul and the letters of John the hearts 
of men gaze deep to know what their 
Messiah was. 

From the point of view of a God de- 
scending to live with men — Isaiah's point 
of view — the emphasis that has been placed 
upon the cross, the more glaring, obvious 
cross, must have been the hardest part of 
dying on it. The picturesqueness — the 
vulgar appeal of the subtlest, divinest, si- 
lentest, most ceaseless sorrow on the earth 
— the cross was the narrowing down of the 
incarnation, not to its consummate point, 
but to its final inexpressibleness. It was 
the final attempt to crowd the infinite love 
which had been manifested more in the 
patience and divineness of every day, into 
the tiny, awful word that men call Death 
— the shallow side of suffering. 

Standing in the awful light of that mo- 
ment when Jesus died for them — so much 
more awful to them than to Him — so much 



140 Gbe SbaDow Gbrtet 



more awful than it was to them when they 
died themselves — the simple and terrified 
hearts of the Apostles wrote their memories 
of the Christ. They could not but be mor- 
bid with the cross. It was the key- moment 
through which they came to all the other 
moments, and through its immeasurable re- 
buke they wrote the life and interpreted 
the days that had passed. But Isaiah's in- 
sight did not come through the blinding 
misery of his own cowardice and the for- 
saken death of God. He saw Him through 
the stern exigencies of his own prophetic 
life — the greater, more sympathetic, more 
kindred way of seeing Him — the way that 
men who see before instead of afterward 
must always see. He saw what He had 
given up. He saw Him coming from in- 
finite opportunity to crowd a god into a 
man as he was trying to crowd a prophet 
into a man. He knew the dread necessi- 
ties He had taken upon his soul as one to 
whom the real cross would be not dying 
before — would be coming here at all — an 
insight which makes the fortieth and fifty- 



Gbe Sba&ow Cbrfet 141 



third of Isaiah the supreme interpretation 
of the New Testament, though a solitary- 
soul was singing it hundreds of years away. 
To play at being men like the gods of 
the Greeks, to play at being gods like the 
poets and the dreamers of the earth, were 
not difficult; but to be in grim earnest, with 
uttermost faithfulness, a half- god, with a 
god's ideals and a man's body in a man's 
world; to be a half-man with a god's de- 
sires — Incarnation is the eternal essence 
of sorrow — the great creative sorrow which 
has been the dignity and the destiny of 
the strong from the beginning of the world. 
From the Incarnation downward, which 
was the story of Christ, to the Incarnation 
upward, which is the history of the human 
race, Savonarola and God by the birth in 
Bethlehem are brought into the same great 
tragedy — the manhood of the one, "I will 
be God"; the divinity of the other, "I 
will be a man." The great man's concep- 
tion of a great Messiah, a conception which, 
approaching the divine life from the God's 
point of view, makes the manger in the inn 



i42 Gbe Sbafcow Gbrtet 



a mightier fact than the Cross, and Christ- 
mas the anniversary of the greatest sorrow 
in the world. 

By a natural process in the endeavor to 
reach the feelings of the coarsest men, we 
have come to emphasize the very release 
of Jesus as His crowning sacrifice, because 
it took a form which the very brutes of 
the field would have dimly understood, and 
had the impressiveness of the fundamental 
awe of human life on which to move. The 
result is an exaggerated, lurid cross, loom- 
ing high in the consciousness of men, 
because it is nearest to them, because death 
is the nearest word to terror, the shibbo- 
leth of cowards, of those who have lived 
not yet where life is deep enough to feel 
the gentleness of a grave, or know the way 
it greets a hero, or folds its rest about the 
incarnation-ones who suffer out the des- 
tinies of men. 

The prayer in the later days, "Thy will 
and not mine be done," shall not be nar- 
rowed down to the fear of suffering. It 
shall be widened out into the hope of suf- 



Gbe SbaDow Cbttet 143 



fering longer, the insistence of the incar- 
nation, the spirit of One who in His con- 
flict would have died on three crosses for 
three more years — of love and tireless 
trust and infinite expectancy — One who 
knew that He must die to prove to the 
world who He was, but who could not be- 
lieve — not yet, not quite yet — " Oh, my 
Father, if it be possible let this cup pass 
from me!" — that He must die to prove to 
Peter and James and Philip who He was. 
To prove ourselves to those who hate, by 
dying — that might be — but to prove our- 
selves to those who love, to have them 
side by side wayfaring with us — dear out- 
siders in our hearts — to unfold our very 
souls to them — and ask, "Hast thou been 
so long time with me and dost thou not 
know me?" — to draw their faces in vain 
to our faces — to know that they will come 
at last, that they will look down into the 
eternal silence there — that they will love 
too late. This is Gethsemane love. To 
pass on with an incarnation that has failed 
— to serve our brothers by being remem- 



i44 Gbe Sba&ow Gbrtet 



bered instead of joining our hands with 
their hands and giving them our very 
selves — to give up the privilege of dying 
every day and die once — this was the 
cross of One who hoped to the last to 
found His kingdom upon the recognition 
of men instead of their infinite penitence. 
The hero, be he man or God, chooses the 
living death. He will live in sorrows that 
make the grave beautiful — a paradise of 
dust. He will live to sorrow out service 
for men who make the grave terrible only 
because it has no more to give, because 
there shall be no reaching out there, and 
no cry shall be heard there, and we are 
drawn into the dumbness of the earth. 

The conception which for hundreds of 
years in the Church — in the counting off 
of souls and the worship of results — has 
made the fear of death the courage for con- 
version, finds but a refinement of itself in 
the emphasis of the cross — an emphasis 
which, while it is perfectly just and true 
and Messianic without the remotest ques- 
tion, is open to the objection that it is not 



Zbc Sba&ow Gbrtst 145 



Messianic enough, that it is based on an 
essential under-estimate of One who was 
crucified first with the love that was borne 
Him, then with the hate — who died be- 
tween two thieves — forever the symbols 
of His being on the earth, of the strange, 
sweet, triumphant fellowship He took upon 
Himself — a fellowship which above and 
beyond the cross, every day and every 
hour of misunderstanding, was itself the 
faithfulness, the realness, the bitter literal- 
ness of the incarnation — the being a God 
— a Comrade-God, among the sons of men. 



10 



XXIII 

Zbc Sba&ow Cbtist 
v 

The talking of Jesus with Moses and Elias 
is the secret way back to Isaiah's prophecy 
for the modern heart — the parable of 
Isaiah's life. 

Born with the instincts of greatness, one 
of the kindred of heroic vision, Elias was 
not as far from Jesus as the way Peter and 
James and John looked, when they were 
told what the Kingdom really was. They 
stand as the sorrowful symbol of contem- 
porary faith in every age, toward every 
prophet. Wistful, wondering, struggling, 
ordinary men, day after day, in attracted 
dullness, they had hung upon His words. 
In the only way in which men who were 
arguing who should be greatest could call 
Him out, they called Him out; but there 

146 



Zbc SbaDow Gbrist 147 



came a time when there was nothing for 
them to do but to stand apart — to watch 
their Master talking with the great. 

To Peter and James and John the trans- 
figuration was the way Jesus had never 
looked for them — the shining in His face 
when great hearts loved Him back — the 
moment of His being understood. 

To Jesus it was the moment of the 
mighty listeners, the moment when the 
men He might have had and the men He 
had to have faced each other — when the 
heartache of the difference shot its pain 
through the shining in His face. 

In the soul of the Saviour they stood, 
these two groups of love. Between them 
a Cross. A transfiguration with Peter and 
James and John shut out, an absent-minded 
transfiguration, could not have come to 
Him. He was too great for that. He could 
face His fact and His faith in the one same 
calm, beautiful mood. It was the very essence 
of His greatness to think of the fishermen 
then. The one moment of utter brother- 
hood in His pitilessly solitary life, with the 



148 TLbe Sbafcow Cbriat 



neighbors of His spirit by His side — He 
was a Saviour because it was but a moment. 
He gave the password of the great, and 
then walked down the mountain to love 
ordinary James and try again with Judas 
and be Peter's brother until He died. The 
more beautiful transfiguration was the one 
on the way down, when, listening to the 
prattle of His apostles, transfiguration be- 
came incarnation. " Here in this little 
Galilee, here, now, with this self-same Peter, 
with this poor, pitiful James — HERE, NOW, 
I WILL BE THE SON OF GOD ! " 

Out of the struggle between his trans- 
figuration love and his love of men, Isai- 
ah prophesied an incarnation like this — 
mighty, daily, irrevocable, immeasurable 

— the unceasing crucifixion of the Christ. 
The incarnation was the expectancy of God 

— His trusting the human heart even be- 
yond a cross, — even unto living with it. 
It was only an expectant Isaiah, expectant 
enough to incarnate, who could have pro- 
phesied an expectant Messiah, expectant 
enough to be a comrade with Judas and 



XLbe Sba&ow Cbriat 149 



Pilate and Mary Magdalene. Incarnation 
is the literalness of expectancy — the very 
experiencing of it. The " shall " which is 
but the room the prophet invokes from the 
greatness of God, out of centuries and 
nations, to fulfil himself, was but Isaiah's 
indomitable Now, thrown into the long 
lenses, magnified by the spirit, stretched 
upon the years. The slide of one intense 
experience casts the outlines and colors of 
his soul upon the largest canvas of God. 
He is the portrait of an age — a prophet. 
Peter might have read the history of eigh- 
teen hundred years in the Saviour's eyes, 
had he been a prophet, and Isaiah's face 
was the shadowing of Christ's. 

In the human stress, the agony of solitude, 
the vow of his own creative love, Isaiah 
lifted his heart to the ideal. " Not by be- 
ing great thyself — not by needing great 
men around thee — but by making great 
men out of those thou hast, shalt thou be 
mine," saith the Lord. "In mine own god- 
like handiwork shalt thou come to me. Men 
thou shalt bring, wouldst thou be a man." 



150 Wbe SbaDow Cbrist 



This was the Isaiah spirit. Striving to 
connect his transfiguration, struggling to 
say Now, he discovered the Man of Sor- 
rows and acquainted with grief. 

Wrought out of stolid human heart by 
the slowly coming Christ, Isaiah was the 
first great miracle of His spirit. He pro- 
phesied the Messiah He had tried to be. 
Lifted into the shadow of the mighty love, 
he was the Almost Christ, the Christ of 
the Night. 



"Not having received the promises , but 
having seen them and greeted them from 
afar." 

"Having confessed that they were stran- 
gers and pilgrims on the earth, that they 
were seeking a country of their own" 



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